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Artykuły
DOI Artikel:Płonka-Bałus, Katarzyna: "En grant affection": an unusual portrait of Jean Chenart in a French fifteenth-century prayer book in the Princes Czartoryski Library in Cracow
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.32786#0044
44
in its basic meaning consciously devised by the patron, is
the very essence of Chenarts memorial. In fashioning his
image, he used the Cross and the pilgrims attribute that
could have also been an emblem of his actual noble rank.
The presence of the palm branch unequivocally defines the
kneeling man as a supporter of the piety connected with
pilgrimage, stimulated by the desire to earn indulgence,
and fed by appropriate literature, mainly the pilgrims’ itin-
eraries. It stood in direct opposition to spiritual pilgrim-
ages, practised for the most part in the enclosed religious
communities. Particularly instructive for the proper under-
standing of such monastic practices may be Henry Susos
Vita, intended for the mystics spiritual daughter, Elsbeth
Stagel, and written with her contribution around 1360.
This peculiar autobiography of Suso contains detailed de-
scriptions of individual stages of this unusual way of the
Cross, performed by him in the Dominican friary in Ulm.
It started at the crucifix in the friary s chapter house and
ended in the chancel of the church, before the image of
the Lamentation (a Pieta?). 38 From this account we learn
directly about the actual role of images in these practices
and indirectly also about the fact that spiritual pilgrimages
were regarded not so much as substitutes of the real ones
- and intended for people who for various reasons were
unable to personally travel to the Holy Land - but rather
as a sophisticated spiritual form of the imitatio, stimulated
by an extensive reading of texts of the Meditationes Vitae
Christ kind considered in its broadest sense. In this light,
peregrinatio spiritualis, close to mystical experience, was
the summit of a monastic vita contemplativa. Apparently,
for Jean Chenart it was the active life that counted. So, he
belonged to the majority of the average users of artistically
mediocre book of hours, often serial products made to
cater to the needs of their mediocre audience, for whom
the standardised texts and unpretentious imagery was all
they needed. This world was aptly characterised by Craig
Harbison who considered the ‘prayerbook mentality’ a dis-
tinctive feature of the mentality and popular religiosity of
the fifteenth century. 39 It was a world in which the piety, just
like other social rituals, was based on formalised but strong
emotions (after all, what else does the famous historian
convey when he writes that, ‘a great mourning, a moving
sermon or the mysteries of the faith aroused emotions that
were manifested in streams of tears’ 40?).
The phrase en grant affection’ in Chenart’s mouth is not
exceptional. As early as the twelfth century, the term af-
fectus appeared repeatedly in the treatise De Virtute orandi
(.De modo orandi) written by Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141)
38 J. van Aelst, Visualising the Spiritual: Images in the Life and
Teachings ofHenry Suso (c. 1295-1366), [in:] Speaking to the Eye.
Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150-1650), eds. T. de
Hemptinne, V. Fraeters, M.E. Góngora, Turnhout 2014, p. 135.
39 C. Harbison, Vision and Meditation in Early Netherlandish
Painting, “Simiolous”, 15,1985, p. 87.
40 J. Huzinga, fesień średniowiecza [The Autumn of the Middle
Ages], transl. T. Brzostowski, vol. 1, Warszawa 1978, p. 42.
in 1128-1138, who by virtue of his declaration that ‘in af-
fectibus pietatis est omnis virtus orandi’ (Cap. 7) made the
pious emotion an essential condition of a decent prayer.
The almost 266 surviving copies of this work, executed in
the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century (over
a hundred copies date from the fifteenth century), attest to
the fact that this must have been a universal belief. 41 Johan-
na Scheel assumed on this basis that expressing emotion
was a constitutive element of the images of founders and
adorants in fifteenth-century panel painting and manu-
script illumination, and remarked that it was precisely the
portrayal of emotion, clearly combined with the proper ex-
perience of prayer, that imposed the manner of represent-
ing the prayer in paintings. In the case of the miniature in
the Czartoryski manuscript, the end result was augmented
by the physical association of the image and text, put in the
mouth of the prayer book’s founder, identical with its user.
Is this a sufficient basis for considering ‘the case of Chenart’
from the point of view of the affect studies, following the
recently launched methodological proposal that also the
above-mentioned author refers to? It seems that the am-
biguity of terms, such as feeling, emotion and affect, that
are often used interchangeably (and of which also Johanna
Scheel is well aware 42) prevents us from simply explaining
the ‘prayerbook mentality syndrome’ using the vocabulary
of affective art history. 43 Furthermore, the static portrait of
the pilgrim-founder, totally devoid of the ‘dynamic of emo-
tions’, is rooted, both visually and thematically, in timeless
perspective and belongs to the category of generic repre-
sentations. But, I shall risk a contention that it was pre-
cisely the affect, expressed by the words put in the mouth
of Chenart, that imparted to his portrait in the Book of
Hours 2948 I the fullness of artistic quality, and that it was
an individual manifestation of the collective, communal
and half-conscious experience and expression of medieval
man’s condition in relation to his Creator.
41 J. Scheel, Das Altniederlandische Stifterbild. Emotionsstrategien
des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis, Berlin 2014 (Neue Frankfur-
ter Forschungen zur Kunst, 14), p. 150.
42 Ibidem, pp. 168-169.
43 The confrontation of the results of the research on affects, car-
ried out in psychology and the natural sciences (biology and neu-
robiology), with the methods employed by the humanities, that
has been taking place since the 1990s, poses a question how the
theory of affects could be used in the interpretation of a work of
art, including medieval art, which is a topic of my separate re-
search. In the existing literature the problem was formulated by
Johanna Scheel (ibidem, pp. 118-128 [withbibliography]). Onthe
Polish soil, the problem of the importance of affect theory for the
study of medieval history was recently discussed by J. Tokarska-
Bakir, Podminowane średniowiecze. Mediewistyka po przehmie
afektywnym [The undermined Middle Ages. Medieval studies af-
ter the affective breakthrough], [in:] Kultura afektu - afekt w kul-
turze. Humanistyka po zwrocie afektywnym [The culture of affect
- affect in culture. The humanities after the affective turn], eds.
R. Nycz, A. Łebkowska, A. Daukszta, Warszawa 2015, pp. 27-48.
in its basic meaning consciously devised by the patron, is
the very essence of Chenarts memorial. In fashioning his
image, he used the Cross and the pilgrims attribute that
could have also been an emblem of his actual noble rank.
The presence of the palm branch unequivocally defines the
kneeling man as a supporter of the piety connected with
pilgrimage, stimulated by the desire to earn indulgence,
and fed by appropriate literature, mainly the pilgrims’ itin-
eraries. It stood in direct opposition to spiritual pilgrim-
ages, practised for the most part in the enclosed religious
communities. Particularly instructive for the proper under-
standing of such monastic practices may be Henry Susos
Vita, intended for the mystics spiritual daughter, Elsbeth
Stagel, and written with her contribution around 1360.
This peculiar autobiography of Suso contains detailed de-
scriptions of individual stages of this unusual way of the
Cross, performed by him in the Dominican friary in Ulm.
It started at the crucifix in the friary s chapter house and
ended in the chancel of the church, before the image of
the Lamentation (a Pieta?). 38 From this account we learn
directly about the actual role of images in these practices
and indirectly also about the fact that spiritual pilgrimages
were regarded not so much as substitutes of the real ones
- and intended for people who for various reasons were
unable to personally travel to the Holy Land - but rather
as a sophisticated spiritual form of the imitatio, stimulated
by an extensive reading of texts of the Meditationes Vitae
Christ kind considered in its broadest sense. In this light,
peregrinatio spiritualis, close to mystical experience, was
the summit of a monastic vita contemplativa. Apparently,
for Jean Chenart it was the active life that counted. So, he
belonged to the majority of the average users of artistically
mediocre book of hours, often serial products made to
cater to the needs of their mediocre audience, for whom
the standardised texts and unpretentious imagery was all
they needed. This world was aptly characterised by Craig
Harbison who considered the ‘prayerbook mentality’ a dis-
tinctive feature of the mentality and popular religiosity of
the fifteenth century. 39 It was a world in which the piety, just
like other social rituals, was based on formalised but strong
emotions (after all, what else does the famous historian
convey when he writes that, ‘a great mourning, a moving
sermon or the mysteries of the faith aroused emotions that
were manifested in streams of tears’ 40?).
The phrase en grant affection’ in Chenart’s mouth is not
exceptional. As early as the twelfth century, the term af-
fectus appeared repeatedly in the treatise De Virtute orandi
(.De modo orandi) written by Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141)
38 J. van Aelst, Visualising the Spiritual: Images in the Life and
Teachings ofHenry Suso (c. 1295-1366), [in:] Speaking to the Eye.
Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150-1650), eds. T. de
Hemptinne, V. Fraeters, M.E. Góngora, Turnhout 2014, p. 135.
39 C. Harbison, Vision and Meditation in Early Netherlandish
Painting, “Simiolous”, 15,1985, p. 87.
40 J. Huzinga, fesień średniowiecza [The Autumn of the Middle
Ages], transl. T. Brzostowski, vol. 1, Warszawa 1978, p. 42.
in 1128-1138, who by virtue of his declaration that ‘in af-
fectibus pietatis est omnis virtus orandi’ (Cap. 7) made the
pious emotion an essential condition of a decent prayer.
The almost 266 surviving copies of this work, executed in
the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century (over
a hundred copies date from the fifteenth century), attest to
the fact that this must have been a universal belief. 41 Johan-
na Scheel assumed on this basis that expressing emotion
was a constitutive element of the images of founders and
adorants in fifteenth-century panel painting and manu-
script illumination, and remarked that it was precisely the
portrayal of emotion, clearly combined with the proper ex-
perience of prayer, that imposed the manner of represent-
ing the prayer in paintings. In the case of the miniature in
the Czartoryski manuscript, the end result was augmented
by the physical association of the image and text, put in the
mouth of the prayer book’s founder, identical with its user.
Is this a sufficient basis for considering ‘the case of Chenart’
from the point of view of the affect studies, following the
recently launched methodological proposal that also the
above-mentioned author refers to? It seems that the am-
biguity of terms, such as feeling, emotion and affect, that
are often used interchangeably (and of which also Johanna
Scheel is well aware 42) prevents us from simply explaining
the ‘prayerbook mentality syndrome’ using the vocabulary
of affective art history. 43 Furthermore, the static portrait of
the pilgrim-founder, totally devoid of the ‘dynamic of emo-
tions’, is rooted, both visually and thematically, in timeless
perspective and belongs to the category of generic repre-
sentations. But, I shall risk a contention that it was pre-
cisely the affect, expressed by the words put in the mouth
of Chenart, that imparted to his portrait in the Book of
Hours 2948 I the fullness of artistic quality, and that it was
an individual manifestation of the collective, communal
and half-conscious experience and expression of medieval
man’s condition in relation to his Creator.
41 J. Scheel, Das Altniederlandische Stifterbild. Emotionsstrategien
des Sehens und der Selbsterkenntnis, Berlin 2014 (Neue Frankfur-
ter Forschungen zur Kunst, 14), p. 150.
42 Ibidem, pp. 168-169.
43 The confrontation of the results of the research on affects, car-
ried out in psychology and the natural sciences (biology and neu-
robiology), with the methods employed by the humanities, that
has been taking place since the 1990s, poses a question how the
theory of affects could be used in the interpretation of a work of
art, including medieval art, which is a topic of my separate re-
search. In the existing literature the problem was formulated by
Johanna Scheel (ibidem, pp. 118-128 [withbibliography]). Onthe
Polish soil, the problem of the importance of affect theory for the
study of medieval history was recently discussed by J. Tokarska-
Bakir, Podminowane średniowiecze. Mediewistyka po przehmie
afektywnym [The undermined Middle Ages. Medieval studies af-
ter the affective breakthrough], [in:] Kultura afektu - afekt w kul-
turze. Humanistyka po zwrocie afektywnym [The culture of affect
- affect in culture. The humanities after the affective turn], eds.
R. Nycz, A. Łebkowska, A. Daukszta, Warszawa 2015, pp. 27-48.