Choices:

Arthurian Motifs in Medieval Lives

Popular Culture Association 29th Annual Meeting

Arthurian Legend Section

March 31‑April 3, 1999

Several years back I taught a series of courses on the Arthurian tradition. To present my students with visual images of the Arthurian legends as an aide to our discussions, I surveyed the medieval visual arts for examples of the various characters from the stories, consulting as many examples of medieval Arthurian art prior to 1501 C.E. as I could find. I then took a closer look at those pieces that were not manuscript illuminations, woodcuts or incunabala. I gathered as much contextual information as I could about each piece, and then I collated the results. The patterns that emerged are thought-provoking and have much to say about what medieval people valued on an individual basis as opposed to what they transmitted through the manuscript tradition.

The manuscripts are littered with textual descriptions of statues and portraits of the various figures; other favored media include frescoes and embroideries, though all of the visual arts are represented in one place or another. As far as actual medieval visual representations of the tales are concerned, the bulk of our evidence comes from manuscript illuminations, woodcuts and incunabula. But, as the manuscripts attest, there were also frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, wood carvings, tiles, tapestries, embroideries, ivory caskets, quilts, leatherwork, enamels, metalwork, and other media represented.

Some of these scenes come from variants of the legends for which no textual record survives. Cathedrals and chapels favored images of Arthur, often in his role as one of the Nine Worthies. Bearers of the Chalice at the Cross, the Holy Grail motif, were also popular with the clergy (Malcor 1991). Yet the images in private spaces, areas in shadows or otherwise hidden from the eyes of the public, came primarily from the great love stories of Arthurian romance and most frequently from the legend of Tristan and Isolde.

The choices made by the artists who executed these motifs or the patrons who bought or commissioned the works say something important about what specific tales in the Arthurian tradition meant to the people who incorporated the stories into their everyday lives. In this paper I want to take a look at some of those choices to see if any common criteria for selection can be determined.

Arthur: King of Kings

To understand the art that adorned the private spaces, we must first look at the Arthurian works that graced public spaces. The most prominent of these concerned Arthur himself. In Liber Floridus (1120 C.E.) Lambert, canon of St. Omer, wrote, “There is in Britain, in the land of the Picts, a palace belonging to the warrior Arthur, built with marvelous art and skill, in which all his exploits and wards are seen sculptured.”[i] This fictional account of where images of Arthur can be found is actually inaccurate from the bits of evidence that we have. Images with Arthur himself as the central figure occur almost exclusively in sacred settings: cathedrals, chapels, and the like.[ii] One instance, the Perros Relief (ca. 1100 C.E.), concerns a Saint’s Life (that of St. Efflam). Several others concern secular tales and/or motifs.[iii]

Far and away the most popular portrayal of Arthur in the visual arts, beyond those in the text tradition, is that of Arthur as one of the Three Christian Kings of the Nine Worthies.[iv] While a handful of Nine Worthies portrayals turned up in castle dining halls,[v] most appeared in cathedrals, churches, chapels, and other “sacred” spaces, usually in the nave and in plain view of the public. The media used to portray the motif ran the gamut: sculpture, fresco, enamel, tapestry, and glass, in addition to woodcuts.

The notion that the figure of Arthur belongs in a sacred context is interesting. In the manuscript tradition, he appeared either as a foil for saints, as a wronged husband, or as a Christian king. In the visual arts he became part of a sermon preached to the populace.[vi] But Arthur was the second most popular figure in the visual tradition. The most popular was Tristan.

Tristan and Isolde: A Personal Favorite

As Loomis noted (1938:19), it takes only a casual survey to realize that the topic of choice among Arthurian images was the romance of Tristan and Isolde. More than twice as many images survive of Tristan as do of Arthur, and surviving depictions of Tristan outnumber Lancelot by over three to one.

For personal items, such as handmirrors and quilts, people chose the legend of Tristan and Isolde as a decorative motif far more frequently than they chose images from any other tale. The notion that Tristan’s story somehow belonged in a private space came early and was reflected in the stories themselves. Thomas tells how Tristan carved sculptures of Isolde to ease his grief, placing the statues in a hall in a cavern in the woods.[vii] Two other fictional descriptions of Tristan appear on the golden chalice in Jean Renart’s L’Escoufle,[viii] where the vessel is a gift as a communion cup given to the guardians of the Holy Sepulchre by the Count of Montivilliers, and on a golden cup in a poem by the troubadour Peire Cardinal (ca. 1200-1250), in which the vessel is “sent by the Sultan of Turkey as a gift for the Franks.”[ix] Tristan and Isolde also appeared embroidered on robes in Floriant et Florete (c. 1250-1275)[x] and the Middle English poem Emaré (late 14th c.).[xi]

Outside the MS tradition, Tristan’s story appeared in less conspicuous spaces. The tales in the visual arts tend to vary from the MS tradition as well. The Forrer Casket (c. 1200),[xii] for instance, features scenes from Eilhart’s, Thomas’s and Gottfried’s versions of Tristan, yet was probably carved prior to the composition of either Gottfried’s or Thomas’s work. Although this casket represents the earliest representation of the legend in the visual arts,[xiii] a single written source cannot be identified, which definitely raises the possibility that the source was an oral tradition that incorporated all of the elements later used by various authors.[xiv] By the mid‑thirteenth century the Schmalkalden murals, which show that the written legends were produced.[xv] The Munich Tristan MS, in turn, may have drawn some of their images from the Stasbourg Cathedral statues. In other words, the manuscript tradition was actively interplaying with the visual arts.[xvi]

Loomis and Loomis (1939:42) pointed out that Tristan’s legend was “the most popular romance subject for enamels, embroideries and wall-paintings,” as well as showing up in ivory carving and manuscript illuminations. The story appealed to artists in both the secular and sacred segments of society. Mirror casings and jewel-caskets were among the most common items to carry the legend.

The pavement of the Abbey of Chertsey (c. 1270) included scenes from Tristan’s story.[xvii] Henry III supposedly suggested the Tristan romance as the topic for the Abbey tiles.[xviii] Thirty-five scenes can be identified as coming from the Tristan legend.

Tristan and Isolde are featured on the murals that decorate the gallery of the Summer House at Runkelstein.[xix] More murals of Tristan and Isolde decorate the passage to “The Ladies’ Chamber” of the Summer House.[xx] The inscription “Tristan” appeared on paintings at Schrogenstein, Bozen, as well.[xxi] These are all semi-private spaces where the images would have been viewed primarily by family members and most frequently by the women of the household.

When the Tristan legend does appear in a public setting, it is usually found in an obscure, hard-to-view spot. The S. Floret murals, for instance, are located high up on the walls of the great hall, near the ceiling, which would have rendered them very difficult to view.[xxii] These murals once again represent a montage of aspects of the tradition rather than a unified story. Inscriptions indicate that the scenes were taken from the Meliadus,[xxiii] with the exception of the “Tryst Beneath the Tree,” the most popular of all the Tristan motifs--and a scene that is not found in the Meliadus, though it does occur in the Prose Tristan, one of the sources for the Meliadus.[xxiv]

Six embroideries of the Tristan legend owe their story to a tale that served as a source for Eilhart von Oberg and Gottfried, with Eilhart owing far more to the source than Gottfried.[xxv] Three of these embroideries were likely the work of nuns at Wienhausen.[xxvi] One, the Luneburg Embroidery, came from the village church of Emern and was most likely produced in lower Saxony in the fourteenth century.[xxvii] Another, the Erfurt Tablecloth (c. 1370), originally came from the Benedictine nunnery at Wurzburg.[xxviii] The sixth, the South Kensington Embroidery (ca. 1370), may have been designed by the same person who designed the Erfurt Tablecloth, given the correlation of scenes between the two embroideries. Another scene of Tristan and Isolde was added in one corner by a different hand. No other contextual information is available,[xxix] but some scholars have speculated that the embroideries were intended as wedding gifts. As such, they were meant to be used in private rather than in public spaces, and the moral content of their message directed at the wife.

Beroul’s Tristan, or a source akin to it, provided the images on the ivory casket in the Hermitage.[xxx] Produced at Paris (1300-1340), the casket was intended for secular use by a lord or lady.[xxxi] Some panels contain scenes that may not be from Beroul or which may have appeared in a part of Beroul that is now lost.[xxxii] A related casket from the same workshop shows one sequence of scenes from the Folie Tristan and of Tristan in a pose that is likely copied from a Psalter in conjunction with scenes of other lovers.[xxxiii]

Two mid-thirteenth-century bed-quilts of Sicilian origin depict a strand of the Tristan legend that eventually found written expression in the Tristano Riccardiano, the Tavola Rotunda and the Cuento de Tristan de Leonis.[xxxiv] The scenes are not sequential; instead to follow the story as we know it requires jumping back and forth, from on quilt to the other. The coverlets were most likely wedding gifts.[xxxv]

The “Tryst Beneath the Tree”, which depicts King Mark hiding in a tree above Tristan and Isolde as the lovers meet, is by far the most common Tristan motif in medieval art.[xxxvi] It spans several media: ivories, crystal, wood, embroidery, and stone.

The items are just as varied: caskets, corbels, misericords, and combs. But all of the images I have examined to date were either located in a place that is impossible to view, in a semi-private space, or intended for use in an exclusively private space, with the last of these three divisions predominating.

Lancelot and Gawain: Knights on the Edge

Lancelot’s story also occupied private spaces within the manuscript tradition, but in very specific forms. Lancelot paints murals of himself and Guinevere in the Vulgate Lancelot.[xxxvii] Arthur views the pictures in the Mort Artu.[xxxviii] The Vulgate says that the pictures of the love affair were painted in the cell where Morgan held Lancelot.[xxxix] In other words, the space was about as private and secular as it was possible to get. In the real world, portrayals of Lancelot are indeed found primarily in private spaces. For instance, his legend is depicted on several ivory caskets that were mass-produced in Paris.[xl] In more public spaces, Lancelot’s figure did not have the same concept of “sacredness” attached to it that Arthur’s did.[xli] For instance, it was okay to whitewash over Lancleot, which is what happened to the only known wall-painting of Lancelot in England.[xlii]

Gawain’s stories from the manuscript tradition, in contrast, often appeared in borderline spaces, locations that were often somehow both private and public. The Perlesvaus, for instance, says that the story of his life was painted in a semi-private, sacred place: on the walls of a chapel in a castle that falls to ruins and is inhabited only by a priest and a clerk when Arthur and Gawain find it.[xliii] In Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Krone (ca. 1220) Gawain sees the tale of one of his adventures on a golden platter.[xliv] In this case, the context is public rather than private, but the viewing itself is of a rather private nature, since no one else looking at the platter is actually the person depicted there.

When Gawain’s story appears in a private space, it does so in conjunction with a legend from Lancelot’s corpus, and this union happens most frequently on ivory caskets.[xlv] These caskets were often given as wedding gifts and tended to reside in the bedrooms of the married couple. The tale probably served on as a sermon on morality. Similarly, when Lancelot’s tale appears in a borderline region, as in the case of the capital of the nave of S. Pierre in Caen, the presence of Gawain’s story seems to have influenced the choice to use Lancelot’s legend as well.

Perceval: The Divine Fool

Tales of Perceval were favored for frescoes in dining rooms, but his story also appears on caskets that were intended for use in bed chambers.[xlvi] The scenes are taken from several MS traditions, though Chretien’s Conte del Graal and the Estoire and Queste from the Vulgate are the most common sources. Just as the images are found in both public and private spaces, there is an ambiguity in attitudes toward this Grail knight, who, like Lancelot, has his image painted over in some of the murals.[xlvii]

Galahad: The Holy Knight

Galahad, the knight renowned for his chastity, has a curious motif attached to him in the visual arts. Outside of the textual tradition, he appears to show up exclusively in an image in which he obtains the keys to the Castle of Maidens. In three of the depictions, the visual commentary is relegated to a side panel. In six (one plaque and five caskets), the image shares the scene with Enyas’s rescue of the damsel from the wild man, forming an apparent commentary on lust versus chastity. And in one instance the image occurs in conjunction with scenes from tales of Lancelot and Gawain, most likely due to the relationship of Lancelot and Galahad as father and son. So other than a comment on the value of chastity, Galahad appears to be absent from the visual arts.[xlviii]