HUM_YOT

Applied Humanities

Experience and Evidence Experienced Eyes 4 Module Four: Examining the Humanities, continued / Page 4.2.4 Experienced Eyes On this page: 0 of 3 attempted (0%) | 0 of 2 correct (0%) Objective: Explore an example of how the extended study of a work of art can reveal details that would otherwise go unnoticed or unappreciated.

The Mérode Altarpiece

This is a three-piece oil painting. Each endpiece is smaller than the middle piece. The left endpiece shows a man and a woman kneeling in front of a partially open door. There is a crenellated wall with an entranceway in the background. The man is wearing a sword and a dark robe. The woman is wearing a red dress, a dark cape, and a white cowl. The middle piece takes the viewer through the door of the left endpiece. It shows an interior room of a house. There is a partially open window in the background. On the left side, in the foreground, there is an angel kneeling by a table. The angel is wearing a white robe with a blue sash belt. There is an open book, a candle in a candlestick, and lilies in a vase on the table. There is a woman wearing a red dress sitting by the table. She is reading a book. Her dress and the angel’s robe are touching on the floor. Behind the woman is a long bench with a blue covering and blue pillow. Behind the bench is a fireplace. Above the angel, on the wall, are two small oval windows. In the sun rays coming through the right-hand oval window is a cherub carrying a cross. On the same wall as the partially open window is a niche with a pot hanging in it. The third piece shows the interior of a room with a man sitting on a bench. He is holding a piece of wood in his left hand and is using a tool on it. There are other tools on the table in front of him. In the background is a window with the shutters raised to the ceiling of the room. More buildings are seen in the distance through the windows.

The Mérode Altarpiece by Robert Campin. Oil on oak panel, ca. 1427–1432. 2′ 1.5″ × 3′ 10.5″.

Click to enlarge

Art Resource, NY

By now you know that you could invest a small amount of time and energy in looking at this work and see more than you did at first glance. You also know that a quick internet search will likely turn up at least a few short, accessible resources that would tell you even more. In other words, you can learn a lot in 30 minutes.

And as with anything else, having a history of studying art will enable you to see more right off the bat than a true beginner would. For example, your experience might mean you realize right away that this is a painting of the Annunciation, depicting an angel telling Mary that she will give birth to Jesus. If you’re familiar with the story of Jesus, you can bring even more to the painting and could maybe guess that the man working with wood nearby is Mary’s fiancé, Joseph.

But what if you spent even more time with the painting? And knew more about the situation in which it was created and the culture of the people who would have first seen it? What if you spent years investigating this work, this artist, this subject, and this time? Then what could you see?

In the following excerpt from an article published in The Art Bulletin, an academic journal of art history, scholar Meyer Schapiro draws on many years of study to analyze the symbolism of this painting.

“Muscipula Diaboli,” The Symbolism of the Mérode Altarpiece

By Meyer Schapiro

In the Mérode altarpiece by the Master of Flémalle, the figure of Joseph appears in a wing beside the Annunciation as an artisan who fashions mousetraps (Fig. 1).1 Not only is the presence of Joseph in the context of the Annunciation exceptional in Christian art; we are surprised also that his craft of carpentry should be applied to something so piquant and marginal in his métier. The writers on Flemish painting have seen in this singular detail the mind of the author, who shows in other parts of his work an unmistakable disposition to the domestic, the intimate and the tiny; his pictures represent a cozy, well-kept bourgeois world in which the chief actors are comfortably at home. He has been called the “Master with the Mousetrap,”2 and a recent critic has regretted the now accepted name, since the former one is “prettier and more characteristic.”3

I believe that this detail of the mousetrap is more than a whimsical invention of the artist, suggested by Joseph’s occupation. It has also a theological meaning that was present to the minds of Christians in the Middle Ages, and could be related by them to the sense of the main image of the triptych. St. Augustine, considering the redemption of man by Christ’s sacrifice, employs the metaphor of the mousetrap to explain the necessity of the incarnation. The human flesh of Christ is a bait for the devil, who, in seizing it, brings about his own ruin. “The devil exulted when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ the devil is vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in the

mousetrap. He rejoiced in Christ’s death, like a bailiff of death. What he rejoiced in was then his own undoing. The cross of the Lord was the devil’s mousetrap; the bait by which he was caught was the Lord’s death.”4

This metaphor appealed to St. Augustine as an especially happy figure of the redemption; it occurs no less than three times in his writings.5 In another sermon he says: “We fell into the hands of the prince of this world, who seduced Adam, and made him his servant, and began to possess us as his slaves. But the Redeemer came, and the seducer was overcome. And what did our Redeemer to him who held us captive ? For our ransom he held out His Cross as a trap; he placed in it as a bait His own Blood.”6 . . .

The connection of the mousetrap in the picture with the theological metaphor is strengthened by the extraordinary way in which the artist has rendered the Annunciation in the neighboring panel (Meiss, Fig. 3). Instead of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, usual in images of the subject, he has represented a tiny naked figure of a child bearing a cross and descending toward the Virgin along beams of light which have just passed through a window. . . .

As a ray of the sun Through a window can pass, And yet no hurt is done The translucent glass,

So, but more subtly, Of a mother untried, God, the son of God Comes forth from his bride14

In the Mérode panel, the mystery that takes place within the Virgin’s body is symbolized in the space of the house; the various objects, all so familiar and tangible, the door, the window, the towel, the basin, the pot of lilies, the lighted candle, and perhaps others, possess a hidden religious meaning, focussed in the central human figure. The theological sense of the mousetrap becomes more credible as an element of this symbolic whole. The imaging of the incarnation through the movement of the tiny soul- homunculus passing through glass along the rays of light belongs to the same mode of fantasy as the metaphorical mousetrap with its fleshly bait for the devil. Together they mark the poles of the human career of Christ.

II

The image of the mousetrap depends, of course, on the presence of Joseph, who is a most unusual figure beside the Annunciation. In the two other examples that I know—a painting by Giovanni di Paolo,15 contemporary with the Mérode panel, and a tapestry in Reims of about 153016—the mousetrap is not rendered. . . .

In the Mérode triptych, which was probably made in the 1420’s, the introduction of Joseph is peculiarly timely and local. This is a moment of strong propaganda for the cult of Joseph, which is undeveloped before the end of the fourteenth century.17 In 1399, the feast of Joseph (March 19) was adopted by the Franciscan order, and a little later by the Dominicans, but it did not enter the Roman breviary until 1479 and became obligatory for the entire church only in 1621. . . .

Here it is enough to observe that the cult of Joseph, when considered beside the worship of the apostles and the local saints, who represent the authority and miracle- working powers of the church, places the human family of Christ in the foreground of devotion. It is essentially domestic and bourgeois, and celebrates the moral, familial virtues of the saint, rather than a supernatural accomplishment. Joseph belongs to the world as a husband and artisan, but he is also a model of continence. . . .

III

The double character of the mousetrap in the painting, as domestic object and theological symbol, suggest the following reflections on the art. In the early Middle Ages the notion that the things of the physical world are an allegory of the spiritual, did not entail the representation of these things as the signs of a hidden truth. The symbolism of art was largely confined to personifications and to the figures and episodes derived from the holy books; if animals were represented as symbols, they were most often the creatures named in the Bible, like the four beasts of John’s and Ezekiel’s visions, or the half-fabulous beings described and interpreted in the Physiologus. The introduction of nature and, with it, of the domestic human surroundings into painting can hardly be credited to a religious purpose. The mousetrap, like the other household objects, had first to be interesting as a part of the extended visible world, before its theological significance could justify its presence in a religious picture. But even as a piece of still life, the mousetrap is more than just an object in a home; it takes place beside the towel and the basin of water as an instrument of cleanliness or wholeness, and may therefore be regarded as an overt symbol of the Virgin’s purity in the same sense as the others and, like them, independent of a theological text. The artist who inserts this object among the others feels its qualitative connection with them and creates a poetic unity, based on his love for the quality that attracts him. This love need not be religious in character, but a primary personal (or social) fact, which the religion absorbs and with which the artist himself may color the religious world.

If, now, we look at the mousetrap in this poetic manner as an attribute of Joseph or of Joseph and Mary together, we are led to another result. We have to consider then its significance in relation to the human peculiarities of these two figures, who are man and woman, old and young, married yet chaste, in the context of a miraculous conception. In a poem about a beautiful maiden beside a pious old husband who is making a mousetrap, we would sense a vague, suggestive aptness in his activity, as if his nature and a secret relation to the girl were symbolized in his craft. The painter, in imagining a milieu for the Virgin and her guardian, Joseph, is unconsciously attracted by objects that project in some feature essential characters of the figures and symbolize the hidden elements of the action. As we meditate on the labor of old Joseph who bores tiny holes with his gimlet; as we regard the objects in both rooms, the pair of mousetraps and the tools, the candles, the pot of lilies, the towel, the basin of water, the windows, the open books and the fireplace, they are drawn together in our minds as symbols of the masculine and feminine. The objects which are unified as fixtures and implements of the home and on another level as theological emblems, are also coherent as metaphors of the human situation. The religious symbolism itself depends largely on the same basic properties of ob jects which make them relevant as psychological signs; the vessel, the window or the door, for example, is common to dreams and to religious fantasy as an equivalent of the woman. It is difficult, of course, to fix precisely the meaning of a group of such sexual symbols in a painting. They are often ambiguous, and we lack, moreover, all knowledge of the life history of both the artist and the donor, who dictated perhaps the presence of Joseph and his task. But the process of symbolization is a general one and may be adduced within limits in the decipherment of single works.

From The Art Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 1945), pp. 182–187. Published by the College Art Association.

Multiple-Choice Question

What does Schapiro tell us the mousetrap may represent?

an ingenious father creating small machines that demonstrate his prowess as a craftsman the crucifixion of Christ, which was sometimes compared to a device used to entrap Satan a tool for ridding the world of metaphorical rats a new invention and an emblem of a clean home

Multiple-Choice Question

What cultural movement does Schapiro mention as being a likely influence on the unusual inclusion of Joseph?

a growing awareness of men’s rights contemporary debate about the importance of fathers the growing cult of Joseph growing skepticism about the virgin conception

Response Board Of the arguments Schapiro makes in this article, which do you find most compelling and why?

No response saved yet.

1 For an illustration of the Annunciation see the accompanying article by Millard Meiss (Fig. 3).

2 By Bode, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2nd ser., XXXII, 1887, p. 218.

3 Fierens-Gevaert, Histoire de la peinture fimnande, Paris, Brussels, 1928, II, p. 8.

4 “Exsultavit diabolus quando mortuus est Christus, et ipsa morte Christi est diabolus victus, tanquam in muscipula escam accepit. Gaudebat ad mortem, quasi praepositus mortis. Ad quod gaudebat, inde illi tensum est. Muscipula diaboli, crux Domini: esca qua caperetur, mors Domini.” Sermo CCLXIII, “De ascensione Domini,” Migne, Pat. Lat., XXXVIII, col. 1210.

5 See also Sermo CXXX, ibid., col. 726 (on John 5:5–14), and Sermo CXXXIV, ibid., col. 745 (on John 8:31–34).

6 “Sed venit Redemptor, et victus est deceptor. Et quid fecit Redemptor noster captivatori nostro? Ad pretium nostrum tetendit muscipulam crucem suam: posuit ibi quasi escam sanguinem suum,” ibid., Sermo CXXX, col. 726.

14 Sicut vitrum radio solis penetratur, inde tamen laesio nulla vitro datur,

Share your thoughts with your peers...

Sic, immo subtilius, matre non corrupta, deus, dei filius, sua prodit nupta.

Mone, Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters, Freiburg i. Br., 1853, II, no. 370, p. 63 (“Sequentia de virgine Maria”). Cf. also the poem by a Spanish writer of the 12th century, Peter of Compostela, which I have cited elsewhere in a parallel context (ART BULLETIN, “From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos,” XXI, 1939, p. 349, note 122):

Ut propriis solis radiis lux vitra subintrat, Sic uterum rector superum mox virginis intrat.

(see P. B. Soto, “Petri Compostellani De consolatione rationis libri duo,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, VIII, 4, Münster, 1912, p. 122).

Another example is published by Mone, op. cit., I, p. 63, in the hymn, “Dies est laetitiae in ortu regali . . . ”; its special significance will be discussed in the accompanying article by Millard Meiss, whose questions about the motif of the light passing through the window in the Annunciation have been the occasion of my own consideration of the symbolism. Further examples are cited in the valuable book by Georges Duriez, La Théologie dans le drame religieux en Allemagne au moyen âge, Paris, Lille, 1914, p. 209 (German mystery plays; Amadeus; and St. Bridget, who seems to paraphrase the poems published by Mone), and by K. Smits, De Iconografie van de Nederlandsche primitieven, Amsterdam, 1933, p. 46, who connects this detail in Flemish painting with a corresponding mediaeval Netherlandish text.

15 Now in the National Gallery in Washington; see Art Quarterly, V, 1942, p. 316, fig. 2.

16 Ch. Loriquet, Tapisseries de la Cathidrale de Reims, Paris, Reims, 1882, pl. IX. These tapestries are now in the Municipal Museum.

17 On the history of the cult of Joseph, see O. Pfülf, “Die Verehrung des heiligen Joseph,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, XXXVIII, 1890, pp. 137–161, 282–302, and the articles on St. Joseph in The Catholic Encyclopedia and the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique.

close