Devotional Aesthetics and the Hours of Mary of Burgundy

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

ConnecticutCollege

New London, CT06320

(This essay was written in 2003 and revised in 2008.)

The two works discussed below are “Mary of Burgundy Prays to the Virgin” and “Christ Nailed to the Cross,” both from the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, c. 1475-1479. Painted by an unknown artist known as the Master of Mary of Burgundy, this manuscript is now in the Vienna Library. Illustrations can be found on-line using a Google image search or looking at

Background on the Patron

As the daughter of Charles the Bold (d. 1477) and the sole heir to the Burgundian dukes who controlled the Low Countries, the French region of Burgundy and parts of Northern Germany, Mary of Burgundy was the richest woman in all Europe. In a world of European kings and dukes all trying to ally with the Burgundian Netherlands, Mary received marriage proposals from the age of five from Spanish, French, and Austrian princes. In 1477 when she was just nineteen, her father was killed in battle against the French. Without a male heir, the Burgundian dynasty was finished.

The death of her father put Mary in a precarious position with no real power except the choice of a future spouse. The major factions moved swiftly to capitalize on her weakness, starting with the French king who immediately tried to seize Burgundy and contested areas in the Southern Netherlands. At home, the people of the Low Countries had long resented the Burgundian dukes for their relentless attempts to centralize authority at the expense of the local nobility and the traditional privileges and freedoms of provinces, districts, and towns. Just 35 days after the death of her father, the local nobility and political bodies forced Mary to sign The Great Privilege abolishing the local ducal Parliament of Mechelen and restoring all the local autonomy and privileges abolished by the duke of Burgundy over the last 75 years. Henceforth, Mary was forbidden from waging war, negotiating peace, or raising taxes without local consent.

In a dukedom without a duke, the young and inexperienced Mary fell back on the advice of her stepmother, Margaret of York, who helped her deflect English and French marriage proposals. With pressure mounting on all sides and France considering more aggressive military action to force Mary’s hand in marriage, she agreed to marry Maximilian, the son of the (German) Emperor Frederick III. The wedding took place six months and eight days after the death of her father. Burgundy was now part of Hapsburg Austria and Germany. Five years later (1482), while falconing with her husband, Mary’s horse threw her and then landed on her, breaking her back. She died two days later at the age of twenty-five.

Mary of Burgundy with Mary and Christ in a Church Interior

The manuscript illumination of Mary of Burgundy with Mary and Christ in a Church Interior plays on the traditional theme of the Madonna as Ecclesia, here shown Crowned as the Queen of Heaven yet seated on the ground as the Madonna of Humility. The artist cleverly imbedded Mary visually into altar behind her and aligned her vertically in an axial composition with the elongated nave of the fifteenth-century Gothic cathedral around her. These artistic choices encourage the attentive viewer to see Mary as an approachably human yet triumphant Ecclesia, presenting Christ the Corpus Christi on the altar of her lap for sacramental veneration and worship. At the right, a priest splendid;y dressed in red swings a censor

The patron, Mary of Burgundy, sits in the foreground wearing an elegant courtly gown and a fashionable pointed headdress with a courtly lapdog curled up peacefully. She also sports a golden necklace with a far more expensive jeweled pendant beside her on the ledge beside two carnations, a vase of irises, and gold-brocade pillow with tassels.

Mary of Burgundy presents herself absorbed in devotional reading and prayer, her eyes focused on a precious, illuminated Book of Hours held with a sumptuous green fabric to protect it. Here is one clue that costly material things can be compatible with the sacred, especially when they surround it as adornments following the material aesthetic of Late Gothic church art. We can see this in the distant altar decorated with a carved and gilded altarpiece set within the larger splendor of the cathedral with its stained glass and soaring columns. The same aesthetic allows the artist to embellish the Madonna and Child with a lavish Oriental carpet seen frequently in Netherlandish religious art since the days of Van Eyck. As Flora Irving observed, Mary’s dress matches the color of the carpet and the gold altar behind just as the second Mary, kneeling inside the church, wears a dress combining the blue of Mary’s robe and the gold of the carpet.

Devotional Art and Literature as the Soul’s Window on the Sacred

Devotional manuals described a two-fold physical relationship between the present and the sacred past. On the one hand, the pious Christian was advised to participate bodily and emotionally in the sufferings of Christ, as seen in the illumination depicting Christ Nailed to the Cross. Ludolph of Saxony urges his readers to pray with their bodies mimicking the posture of the crucified Christ and to lie prostrate on the ground, thereby reliving Christ’s humility. [i] Discussing the nailing of Christ to the Cross, he recommends the following prayer.

“… grant that I, who have deserved the cross by my sins, may, looking upon Thee, be entirely transfixed in flesh and spirit, and despising all injury, contumely, and shame, may be fastened to the Cross with Thee, so that I may know nothing except Thee, O Jesus, Thee my crucified Lord.” [ii]

At another point, Ludolph urges modern Christians to adopt the position of the crucified Christ while praying in order to embrace Christ bodily on the cross.

We also learn that we ought to be stripped of all worldly things and deeds, contrary to our salvation, in order that, as St. Jerome says, we may naked follow the bare Cross. … Let him [the Christian] pray in these words, “Oh Jesus, Who before Thy crucifixion didst vouchsafe to be stripped of Thy clothes and exposed naked in the sight of all, grant that I may be stripped of all worldly things, in so far as they are contrary to my salvation, so that I may naked follow thee crucified on the bare Cross. … The second lesson is that we should gaze with the eyes of our heart on our Saviour extended on the Cross, with arms outstretched as if ready to receive us into His loving embrace…. In order to conform himself to this point a man may extend his arms and all the limbs of his body in the form of a cross, either whilst standing or lying on the ground … [iii]

Throughout Ludolph’s lengthy devotional manual on the Life of Christ, every sacred event is transformed into a series of physical, emotional, and spiritual experiences for the modern Christian which transform the present by uniting it with the past.

Devotional manuals and art also reinforced a second physical relationship with the life of Christ through the idea of a continuing Passion, his sufferings (and those of Mary) renewed continually by the sins of the present. Here is a typical example from Ludolph, taken from the section on Christ nailed to the cross.

“Let us take care never to make nails for the Cross of Christ, nor to wound or pierce His hands or feet with them. He who sows strife among his neighbors makes nails for the Cross of Christ. He who will not give alms ... wounds and pierces the hands of our Lord with nails. He who frequents theaters, places of amusement, or taverns, more than churches, drives iron nails into the feet of Christ.” [iv]

The two most unusual features of this composition are the window used to frame the distant sacred figures and the doubling of the patron who appears again in the church space, kneeling in an even more sumptuous robe before the Virgin along with three other courtly women. The open window separating the two images of the patron appears elsewhere in this manuscript and works as a clever device on a number of levels. On the one hand, it heightens the perspectival space masterfully handled by this artist and proudly shows off the new naturalism of the later fifteenth century which opens a visual "window" into another world. By opening the window toward the viewer and placing the right edge at the very edge of the picture plane, the artist used the window to dissolve the picture plane further. Both sides of the opened window pull Mary of Burgundy and the real viewer into a single illusionary space which stretches continuously from the beholder’s world outside the picture all the way into the deep space of the church.

At the same time, perspectival space works here to heighten the devotional proximity of the pious patron to the sacred figures called up as visionary presences. Whether the meditating soul projects itself into the sacred past or projects sacred history into the modern world, the act of devotion brings the past to life in the imaginary moment of the present.Using the window device, the artist encouraged viewers to participate fully in that past through the private, inner “window” of devotional art and literature. By having two women in the left foreground of the Nailing of Christ turn and look out at the real spectator, the artist further connected the viewer’s experience of looking with the reciprocating gaze back out from an even closer witness to the Passion.

The Window as Reverential Distance

At the same time, the window device also worked to separate the patron from the sacred figures by confining her to a non-ecclesiastical space - presumably a room in her palace. The artist underscored that separation by restating it in the ecclesiastical interior where all five human figures carefully stand back from the sacred carpet reserved for the Madonna and guarded by four angels with candles at each corner. On our side of the window, a courtly lady sits reading an expensive prayer book with a lap dog. On the distant side, we enter a sacred space where the courtly lady now kneels, without book or dog and where an exemplary feminine lap now display the savior of the world.

Seen this way, the window worked to sustain an important distance between sacred and profane which lay at the heart of Christian meditation. This distance was fundamental tofourteenth and fifteenth century devotional art and literature which sought to preserve a reverential separation between past and present, sacred and profane even as it brought the modern Christian face to face with sacred history. Aware of this theme of reverential distance, the artist used his window to allegorize the separation between sacred history and the modern present. This is particularly clear in the scene of Christ Nailed to the Cross.

Here the window helps distinguish, in the unique visual terms of artistic images, between the mundane, modern world with its earthly concerns and perception and the higher world of Christian values and visions. To clarify this function of the devotional window, the artist replaced Mary of Burgundy with an overflowing jewel box and the same gold-brocaded pillow, now with a long string of pearl-like rosary beads lying over it. He also included a private prayer book opened to a large illumination depicting the Crucifixion with Mary and John on either side of the cross. Through this clever still-life placed on the more worldly side of the window, the artist echoes the advice of devotional handbooks like Ludolph of Saxony to put aside or “strip away” all costly adornment and worldly values when meditating on the naked, crucified Christ.

Let him pray in these words, “Oh Jesus, Who before Thy crucifixion didst vouchsafe to be stripped of Thy clothes and exposed naked in the sight of all, grant that I may be stripped of all worldly things, in so far as they are contrary to my salvation, so that I may naked follow thee crucified on the bare Cross”. [v]

The contrast between the jewel box, on the one hand, and the rosary and Book of Hours, on the other, encouraged the viewer to move from more worldly concerns with female beauty and vanity to the spiritual “adornment” of a rosary bead whose similarity to a pearl necklace only underscored its essential difference. So too, facial adornment yielded to the higher cosmetics and colored surfaces of painted prayer books. Like the fabled noblewoman and harlot, Mary Magdalen, who gave up her jewelry to follow Christ and who appears in the Nailing scene behind the fainting Madonna, the courtly still-life allegorized Mary of Burgundy’s Imitatio Christi as followed the stripping of Christ by putting aside all physical beauty. Even her rosary beads imitate the exemplary cross-pattern formed by Christ’s crucified body shown above.

In the Christ Nailed to the Cross, the artist also used Old Testament sculptures framing the window - Abraham and Isaac at left and Moses and the Brazen Serpentat right to add a theological variation on the theme of distance and connection between worldly and spiritual. Given the widespread late medieval understanding of the Old Testament and of Judaism as a material and profane realm compared to a spiritual New Testament and Christianity, the Old Testament sculptures elaborate in theological terms the tension between worldly and spiritual. This is particularly clear in the theme of Moses and the Brazen Serpent which, on one level, allegorizes Christian stereotypes about Jewish idolatry and a “false” faith tied to material splendor and precious gold.

At the same time, the Old Testament sculpture of the idol raised up on a cross worked as typological harbinger of the Crucifixion, linking the two sides of the window in the seamless continuity of Christian time. To enhance this continuity in visual terms, the shield-bearing angel under the scene of Abraham and Isaac looks through the window at the stripping and nailing of Christ. This universal time continues into the fifteenth-century present in the courtly still-life in the foreground – already sanctified by the prominent rosary - and the illumination depicted in the open prayer book.

Through private devotion, Mary of Burgundy (and any meditating soul) enjoyed a higher, visionary access to the unity of Christian time, from Judaism to the coming of Christ to the later epoch of the Christian church which extended through the fifteenth-century presentto the end of time. From her own distinct temporal perspective on the worldly side of the window,Mary of Burgundy couldsee her location in a larger Christian cosmos of space and time. Handled with complexity and nuance, the window device allowed Mary to envision a spiritual hierarchy moving gradually and fluidly from worldly to celestial, “from visibles to invisibles,” as contemporary sacramental theology put it. The window also helped her see her location in the grand scheme of Christian time by encouraging her to hope for salvation through Christ’s Passion, and, equally importantly, through her continuing meditation on it. If all Christian devotion yearned for salvation, the artist signaled a positive outcome in the page depicting Mary of Burgundy with the Madonna and Child in a Church. Despite the reverential distance maintained by the window and the Oriental carpet, Mary and Christ both look over at the kneeling Mary of Burgundy, suggesting Marian intercession while allowing her to envisionfuture bliss.

Woman’s Spirituality and the Human, Loving Christ

Though private devotion to the human, suffering Christ was typical of late Medieval and early Renaissance piety, many scholars have noted the role played by women's spirituality in fostering an image of a bodily, loving Christ, a Christ increasingly seen as a sweet infant, a lover on the cross, and a mystical bridegroom for the human soul, especially the female soul. The general orientation of women's spirituality toward more "feminine" images of the sacred is worth mentioning here because Mary of Burgundy appears in the scene depicting the enthroned Madonna and Child. She appears, significantly, with three other women, two of them youngerwho knee behind her, following her example. The only man is the cleric on the far side of the composition, carefully separated from the all-female court. The two carnations – normally used in fifteenth-century Dutch portraits and religious art as images of betrothal, marriage and nuptial piety – suggest the mystical marriage between Christ and Mary-Ecclesia. Since these flowers appear on our side of the window, they also suggest a nuptial devotional bond between Christ and Mary of Burgundy. Her flaming heart of devotion is also suggested by the large red jewel which hangs over her chest in the distant image of her kneeling inside the church.