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On an unidentified statuette and the queen (likely) behind it
In case you have missed the memo, I love going to museums. And because of that and my own interests, there are a few things that you can always catch me doing when visiting an art historical museum: I will always find the medieval art section and spend a lot of time looking at Gothic sculptures, I will always see any Artemisia Gentileschi on view, I will always look for Judith slaying Holofernes.1
Living close to a museum of art can also feed the little everyday ritual monster. When I was in Paris, first for my MA, then for my research year, it was the Louvre, with its Virgin and Child offered by Jeanne d’Évreux to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1339. Now, living close enough to the Met Museum for the past (almost) ten years, I have been lucky to cultivate recurrent visits to another favorite, enough to know by heart how to get to her and take you along with me.
After standing in line to go through security, you enter the Great Hall, with its imposing domes and arches in limestone, a grand staircase directly in front of you. To the right of the imposing steps, a smaller archway with a podium and a Met employee signals one of the entrances to the museum. We’ll go through there, being welcomed into the gallery of Late Roman and Early Byzantine Secular Objects. We’ll see some beautiful silver plates, mosaics, and jewelry, as we move along to the Medieval Europe Gallery, which concentrates works from the central Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). We can come back to it later, but for now we will zigzag around the windows to reach the Medieval Sculpture Hall. We don’t have to move very far into it. Instead, we will take a sharp right along the wall as soon as we enter the hall, to encounter a wall-mounted vitrine with mostly white marble- and alabaster-sculpted figurines. Among these, we will find a group of three kneeling figures, hands together in prayer: a young man, a crowned man, and a crowned woman.
Less than 40cm tall (15” 3/16), this royal lady in marble was gifted along with her two companions to the Met collections in 1917 by J. Pierpont Morgan’s estate,2 who purchased it from Jacques Selligmann & Co. in Paris in 1910; before that, the group had at some point belonged to French curator Gaston Le Breton (d. 1920) but their provenance becomes absolutely unclear. This lack of traces is, unfortunately, not uncommon for historians of medieval art. When revolutions (and, in the case of France, the Revolution) happen, public monuments—including churches and places of power—tend to be quickly looted, either because they were symbols of a previous regime need to be erased or because said symbols are seen as good art that can fetch a good price on the market.3 It is likely that this trio of figures has gone through the latter.
At this point, you are probably wondering why has this woman brought me to this, of all vitrines? and the answer is pretty simple: no matter what I come to the Met to visit, this is always my first stop. I have been looking at this statuette for the better part of the past decade, wrote a whole paper inspired by her (which ended up only featuring her at the very end), visited the Met archives to read about her, tried my best and failed to fit her in my dissertation.
As I mentioned, we don’t know where these figures came from. Although they stand as fully independent tridimensional sculptures, their depth is significantly curtailed and their backs are almost plain, suggesting that in their original display, like in the current one set in the Met, they were not expected to be seen from the back. So they were likely mounted on a tomb or altar, as donor figures. The dating given by the museum is hesitant (ca. 1340-1350), based on stylistic elements in the figures, and the identification of the members of the family is certain about the two male figures as King Philip VI of France (d. 1350) and his son Jean (not yet “II of France”) (d. 1364).
The woman’s identity is a little less certain. The Met affirms that this is Philip’s second wife, Blanche of Navarre (d. 1398), but I’ve always argued (and so have other scholars) that it is in fact his first wife (and Jean’s mother) Jeanne of Burgundy (d. 1349). It just makes more sense that Jeanne would be portrayed alongside her husband and son, rather than Blanche along with her stepson (this would indeed make it the only known representation where these two appeared as such). Philip, Jeanne, and Jean acted as a trio and appeared together often enough in documents for them to have become almost a sort of “unit of meaning,” the three of them standing as a symbol for the ideal of the French royal family as king-queen-heir.
Donors’ portraits are not “portraits” in the modern sense of the word. They don’t reproduce the physiognomic likeness of an individual, or their exact traits (realistically or embellished). For medieval artists and their audience, a portrait was effective if showed a certain something considered innate to the person. The marble trio is placed within a very aristocratic setting (as, well, donors of some type of art monument, meaning they paid for it), with calm and harmonious expressions and zero traces of the political unrest that had been shaking France (Hundred Years War! famine! plague!). I became fascinated with the queen statuette because of Jeanne of Burgundy. Daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy, sister of Duke Eudes IV of Burgundy, Jeanne was also the granddaughter of King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) through her mother Agnes.4 She was named lieutenant of the kingdom for her husband Philip (the term “regent” is a later invention) during wartime, and she was a bibliophile, commissioning translations into French of Latin texts and effectively kickstarting the collection development by her grandson Charles V, nicknamed the Wise in part because of his book-collecting habits.
She was also a “bad woman” and a “she-devil,” “too evil and dangerous,” and eventually “the evil lame queen,” who caused the destruction of all her enemies and allies alike.5 The last epithet stuck to such a degree that it’s still found on her Wikipedia page:
More often than not, most criticism leveled against queens was actually a way to chastise the king. At the same time, as historian Theresa Earenfight puts it: even the most prominent medieval women were frequently obfuscated by prefabricated categories (usually shades of the saint or the whore), that disregarded the idiosyncrasies of each woman.6 Women in power didn’t have a great time in the Middle Ages, and had an even worse one after that, with the “damned if she didn’t, damned if she did” conundrum trickling down all the way to Marie Antoinette and beyond.7 But while pop culture loves to celebrate the strangeness and peculiarities of a Marie Antoinette, a Catherine the Great, a Victoria, or even an Elizabeth II, it is much harder for these personalities to be built around premodern queens: the fundamental stuff that is needed for these portraits to be created is simply not available, and we have to recourse to a good deal of invention on top of the little that is there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about difficult women and what it means to be drawn to their histories and stories, prompted in no small part by looking back at recent reads and concluding that there’s something irredeemably attractive to me in them (a topic to which I plan on coming back to). Jeanne of Burgundy was one of such women I had the chance to study during my dissertation, whose lives are both formulaic and absolutely full of idiosyncrasy. They could be petty and full of prejudice; they could pay for beautiful pieces of art and be the loudest voice in a room. They are not likable but it is at times hard not to admire some of what they did against all odds. They have been my puzzles for the better part of a decade.
So, every time I come to the Met, I make a beeline to my little queen, kneeling there against all odds, framed for the world to see yet not even securely identified, and I smile back at her, sometimes coyly, sometimes openly, because, despite everything, we’ve come a long way.
Granted, I will look for Judith everywhere, regardless of the museum. Seeing Gentileschi’s Judith slaying Holofernes in Florence in 2012 was basically a moment of aesthetic enlightenment.
After J. Pierpont Morgan died in 1913, most of his collection of art objects was loaned to the Met, and eventually formally gifted in 1917 by his son J.P. Morgan. The New York Times (18 December 1917) announced the gift as totaling U$7,500,000(!) and 3,000(!!) objects.
In these cases, if you are lucky, you’ll find out that a random early modern antiquarian happened to be very interested in just that church or palace or piece of art, enough to produce a description of it, maybe even add a little sketch. If you are really lucky, that antiquarian was François Roger de Gaignières, who hired drawer Louis Boudan and whose collection of drawings assembled in the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century amounts to some 7600 views, 3500 of which of medieval tombs.
Royal family trees are wild enough that she was also the great-aunt of her husband’s second wife.
“Evil woman” (mauvaise fame) and “she-devil” (deablesse) come from an anonymous French chronicle finished in 1339: Chronique Parisienne Anonyme, ed. A. Hellot. Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de- France, XII (1884), 156, 159.
“too evil and dangerous” (trop male et perilleuse) is found in the third version of the first book of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles: Jean de Froissart, Chroniques. Début du Livre 1. Éd. du Manuscrit de Rome Reg. Lat. 869, ed. George T. Diller (Genève; Paris: Droz; Minard, 1972), 182, l. 39. “The evil lame queen” (la male royne boiteuse) comes from an anonymous French chronicle composed around the third quarter of the fourteenth century: Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois (1327-1393), ed. Siméon Luce (Paris, Jules Renouard, 1862), 17.
Parsons, John Carmi. “Damned If She Didn’t and Damned If She Did: Bodies, Babies, and Bastards in the Lives of Two Queens of France.” In Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, 265–99. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Earenfight, Theresa. “Highly Visible, Often Obscured: The Difficulty of Seeing Queens and Noble Women.” Medieval Feminist Forum 44, no. 1 (June 2008): 86–90. https://doi.org/10.17077/1536-8742.1712.
Ah, que vontade de voltar ao MET e esquecer do mundo lá fora!
I grew up in an English village with a C15 church and school (still running!) that was built by Chaucer’s granddaughter, Alice, so I love stuff like this. In case you haven’t read it, the biography ‘Chaucer: A European Life’ by Marion Turner is brilliant by the way.