MASTER BERTRAM ~ GRABOW ALTARPIECE

Master Bertram operated a large workshop in Hamburg in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. His greatest work was the altarpiece for the Church of St. Peter, an enormous polyptych. The sculptured parts include a Crucifixion scene and 44 statues of prophets and saints. There are also 24 painted panels in two rows.

The twelve paintings in the top row illustrate the story of Creation, up to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and their first labors. The lower left paintings depict other stories from the Book of Genesis, and the lower right paintings illustrate the infancy narrative.

MIMOSA PUDICA



Diana Wells:

The Jesuit Pierre d'Incarville had been sent to China to convert the emperor, Chien Lung, to Christianity. China at the time had mostly barred Westerners, but the emperor accepted d'Incarville, who was a skilled clockmaker as well as a botanist. The priest was frustrated in his attempts to collect new plants and only got round the emperor by presenting him with two plants of the Mimosa pudica that he had raised from seed sent from Paris. The leaves of the Mimosa pudica collapse when touched and this, we are told, greatly diverted the emperor, who laughed heartily. D'Incarville was now given access to the imperial gardens and was free to export plants until he died, soon afterward, in 1757.

[100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names]

ARMENIAN PASTORAL STAFF

BAL des ARDENTS



Barbara W. Tuchman:

On the Tuesday before Candlemas Day... the Queen [Isabella of Bavaria] gave a masquerade to celebrate the wedding of a favorite lady-in-waiting who, twice-widowed, was now being married for the third time. A woman's remarriage, according to certain traditions, was considered an occasion for mockery and often celebrated by a charivari for the newlyweds with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders and loud blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the bridal chamber. Although this was a usage contrary to all decency, says the censorious Monk of St. Denis, King Charles [VI] let himself be persuaded by dissolute friends to join in such a charade.

Six young men including the King and Yvain, bastard son of the Count of Foix, disguised themselves as wood savages in costumes of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot. Face masks entirely concealed their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-filled halls, they forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. Plainly, an element of Russian Roulette was involved, the tempting of death that has repeatedly been the excitement of highborn and decadent youth. Certain ways of behavior vary little across the centuries. Plainly, too, there was an element of cruelty in involving as one of the actors a man thinly separated from madness.

The deviser of the affair, cruelest and most insolent of men, was one Huguet de Guisay, favored in the royal circle for his outrageous schemes. He was a man of wicked life who corrupted and schooled youth in debaucheries, and held commoners and the poor in hatred and contempt. He called them dogs, and with blows of sword and whip took pleasure in forcing them to imitate barking. If a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the ground and, standing n his back, would kick him with his spurs, crying, Bark, dog! in response to his cries of pain.

In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles was teasing and gesticulating before the fifteen-year-old Duchesse de Berry when Louis d'Orleans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or deliberately courting danger (accounts of the episode differ), Louis held up a torch over one of the capering monsters. A spark fell, a flame flickered up a leg, first one dancer was afire, then another. The Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry... threw her skirt over [the King] to protect him from the sparks, thus saving his life. The room filled with the guests' sobs and cries of horror and the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stifle the flames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who flung himself into a large wine-cooler filled with water, escaped. The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot, Yvain de Foix and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suffering. Huguet de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his coffin was carried through the strets, the common people greeted it with cries of Bark, dog!.

This ghastly affair, coming so soon after the King's madness, was like an exclamation point to the malign succession of events that has tormented the century. Charles's narrow escape threw Paris into a great commotion, and anger swept the citizens at the appalling frivolity which had so casually endangered the life and honor of the King. Had he died, they said, the people would have massacred the uncles and the court; not one of them would have escaped death, nor any knight found in Paris. Alarmed at these dangerous sentiments with their echo of the Maillotins' rebellion barely ten years past, the uncles prevailed on the King to ride in solemn procession to Notre Dame to appease the people. Behind Charles on horseback, his uncles and brother followed barefoot as penitents. As the involuntary agent of the tragedy, Louis was widely reproached for his dissolute habits. In expiation he built a chapel for the Célestins with marvelous stained glass and rich altar furnishings and an endowment for perpetual prayers.

[A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman. Ballantine Books: New York, 1978]

CONTRASTS

Plates from A.W.N. Pugin's Contrasts:

MASKS of MICHIGAN AVENUE



Standing at just the right spot on Michigan Avenue, just south of the Chicago River, looking north to the Magnificent Mile, it is possible to see an elaborate game of architectural dress-up and make-believe.

The Wrigley Building, constructed in the early 1920s to house the headquarters of the Wrigley chewing gum company, was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White in a French Renaissance style. But the north tower is directly inspired by Seville Cathedral - the famous tower La Griralda, formerly the minaret of the Almohad mosque, rebuilt in later centuries by the Christian reconquerers.



Across the street, the Chicago Tribune Tower stands. Howells & Hood won the contest for its design, invoking the Butter Tower of Rouen Cathedral, which earned its name by being funded by indulgences that allowed donors to consume dairy products during Lent.



These stately architectural invocations of the Spain of the Reconquest and of Gothic France doubtlessly inspired some cheeky Shriners to build an even taller building next to them - one adorned with Moorish, Egyptian and Assyrian decoration. The Medinah Athletic Club went bankrupt in 1933 and sold the building, which is now the Intercontinental Hôtel. Its golden dome was intended as a docking port for dirigibles in less wary times before the Hindenburg disaster.

Nativist newspapermen and chewing gum magnates pretend to be mediaeval Frenchmen and Spaniards; the Masons gleefully play the rôle of the Mohammedans. Just across the river, on one of the dockhouses of the Michigan Avenue Bridge is a relief commemorating the rebuilding of the City following the Great Fire of 1871; the sculptor was James Fraser, best known for designing the Buffalo Nickel.



On it, an heroic female figure tramples a dragon representing the fire; another flies through the air, blowing a trumpet and summoning laborers to reconstruction. The allusions are obvious; these muscular blonde Beaux Arts goddesses are masquerating as Ss. Michael and Gabriel.

LIGHT SHOW at AMIENS

Neglectful centuries have seen the great churches of the High Middle Ages lose one of their most striking characteristics: color. The walls and statues of Gothic churches were brightly polychromed, both on the interior and on the exterior.

These magnificent buildings retain their grandeur, but their walls, faded to plain gray stone, would have been unacceptable to mediaeval men. Sadly, the monochromy of surviving Gothic architecture has given many contemporary men the misconception that Gothic architecture is not supposed to be painted. A Gothic church in full color is difficult to find nowadays; those that exist are so striking as to be presumed exceptional.



None of the great 13th century French Cathedrals has been repainted, but Amiens Cathedral offers its visitors a hint of its original beauty. On summer nights and special occasions, spotlights and lasers are projected at the façade, bathing the ornaments and statuary in bright colors.

ENTOMBMENT by VIKTOR VASNETSOV

ANTI-CATHOLIC SINGALONG

In PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM