La Fucina di Vulcano Studi sull’arte per Sergio Rossi

a cura di

Stefano Valeri

Lithos

© 2016 Lithos EditriceVia Vigevano 2 – 00161 RomaTel./Fax 0644237720www.lithoslibri.itlithoslibri@libero.it

ISBN 978-88-99581-19-0

Grafica e impaginazione: Paolo Tellina

Ha collaborato alla curatela Simona Grillo

INDICE

Introduzione 7

Una fabbrica ecclesiastica riemersa nella Tuscia romana. La collegiata romanica di San Pietro a Cencelle 13Pio Francesco Pistilli

La figura di Giuseppe nell’iconografia e nella tradizione letteraria medievale (con particolare riguardo al «Roman de la Rose») 25Luciano Rossi

The surviving iconography of Marie Becket 37Carla Rossi

Apollo citaredo: note di iconografia musicale 45Stefania Macioce

Ottaviano Ubaldini della Carda e l’influenza dell’alchimia sugli artisti del suo tempo 61Alessandra Bertuzzi

“L’impresa Andrea Bregno” nella Roma del secondo Quattrocento 69Claudio Crescentini

Bastiano Mainardi. Breve racconto di un pittore toscano di fine Quattrocento 79Virginia Pisani

Un disegno di Filippo Bellini e una tela di Martino Bonfini 95Alessandro Zuccari

Jacopino del Conte: una “Lucrezia” e alcune identificazioni di ritratti 109Antonio Vannugli

Autoridad real e identidad nacional: la construcción de los antiguos palacios virreinales de Nápoles y Barcelona 129Carme Narváez

Don Juan Fernández de Velasco e un dono prezioso di Clemente VIII. Precisazioni e nuove proposte attributive per un reliquiario d’argento 141Lucia Ajello

De Roma a Mallorca, una versión inédita de la Santa Caterina Tomàs que salva una nave del naufragio, de Benedetto Luti 151Mariano Carbonell

I Bonazza. Genio e sentimento a servizio della scultura 161Federica Costa

Alienazioni e reintegri in collezione Rospigliosi alla fine del Settecento. Il ruolo del principe Giuseppe 171Maria Celeste Cola

La recepción española del IV Centenario del nacimiento de Michelangelo Buonarroti 181Eva March

Alfredo Ricci (1864-1889): un carteggio con Napoleone Parisani 195Federico De Mattia

Il ruolo dei primi contatti epistolari tra Bernard Berenson e Lionello Venturi nella riscoperta critica di Antonello da Messina 207Elena Damiani

Lionello Venturi: da Venezia a Firenze 219Massimo Fiorot

Osvald Sirén, Lionello Venturi, Riccardo Gualino: un contributo al Formalismo e al collezionismo in Italia 227Antonella Perna

Il Nudo Rosso (Nu Couché) di Modigliani. Da Parigi a Pechino 237Cristina De Santis

Materiali di archivio su Georges Rouault 247Michela Bassu

Il catalogo George Rouault di Lionello Venturi (edizioni 1940-1948-1959) 255Alessandra Montagnoli

“Il Viaggio” di Alberto Burri. Tra contenitore e contenuto 267Cristiano Rosati

Lionello Venturi e le polemiche sull’arte astratta in Italia alla metà del XX secolo 277Stefano Valeri

Profilo bio-bibliografico di Sergio Rossi 289

The surviving iconography of Marie Becket

Carla Rossi

Nel presente articolo propongo una breve analisi iconografica rela-tiva a Marie, abbatissa Berkingensis, che può rappresentare un ulteriore, importante tassello a sostegno dell’identificazione della badessa, sorella di Thomas Becket, con la prima poetessa di lingua francese, Marie de France. Nata a Londra, intorno al 1125-30 (data concordemente fissa-ta dai filologi anche per la nascita della poetessa), da un ricco mercan-te di Rouen, Gilbert, che ricoprì la carica di sceriffo sotto re Stefano d’Inghilterra e da una borghese di Caen, Marie fu la sorella minore di Thomas Becket, il celebre arcivescovo di Canterbury che, brutalmente assassinato il 29 dicembre 1170 per mano di quattro cavalieri di Enrico II Plantageneto, divenne uno dei santi più popolari del Medioevo. Nel 1165, Marie fu costretta dal re Plantageneto a lasciare l’Inghilterra e a recarsi in Francia, grazie alla protezione benevola di Luigi VII, insieme ai propri parenti e ai letterati del circolo becketiano, accanto ai quali la ve-diamo ritratta tanto nelle vetrate di Chartres dedicate a Thomas Becket, il cui progetto iconografico venne ideato da Giovanni di Salisbury, amico e segretario dello stesso Becket, quanto in uno dei frammenti supersti-ti della Vita di Becket, miniata da Matthew Paris, il maggior autore di cronache del Medioevo, sempre ben informato in merito agli eventi che narra. Nella primavera del 1173, poco più di due anni dopo l’assassinio dell’Arcivescovo, Enrico II, per riparare alla morte violenta di Becket, su insistenza di Odone, priore di Canterbury, letterato e amico di Thomas, elesse Marie badessa del più influente monastero femminile del regno: l’abbazia di Barking, che sotto la sua guida ricevette uno stimolo intellet-tuale fortissimo, tanto che negli anni in cui rimase in carica, dal 1173 al 1180 circa, assistiamo alla redazione, presso lo scriptorium di Barking, di ben tre testi agiografici anglo-normanni, ovvero d’una Vie d’Edouard le confesseur, della Vie de sainte Catherine da parte di una monaca di nome

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Clémence e della Vie seinte Audree, poemetto su Santa Eteldreda di Ely, che la critica recente attribuisce proprio a Marie de France.

Recently1, I returned to the fundamental question for philologists, regarding Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s indebtedness to Marie, St. Thomas Becket’s sister, who was Abbess of Barking at the time he wrote her saintly brother’s hagiography, La vie Saint Thomas le martyr de Cantorbire.

The French poet provides us with a very clear profile of Dame Marie, whose literary skills are reflected not only in his dedication, but also in the Latin expression as formulated by Matthew Paris: Maria meritis suis exigentibus est facta abbatissa Berkingensis2, generally used for those per-sons noted for their learning3.

Matthew, who entered the Abbey of St Alban as a monk on 12 January 1217, and was probably born some 17 years earlier, derived much of his information from letters of the protagonists of the stories that he nar-rates, but even more from conversations with eyewitnesses of the events related to the archbishop-martyr, which would mean that his accounts were detailed and well informed, including lively descriptions of people involved and an analysis of the causes and significance of the recorded events. Matthew’s connections made him a fitting observer of contem-porary affairs.

The analysis of Guernes’ dedication lines reinforces the assertion that Marie Becket was a woman qualified to participate in the creative process

1 C. Rossi, A Reflection on the withheld Name of Marie in the Epilogue of Guernes’ Vie Saint Thomas, in Il nome dell’autore, Studi per Giuseppe Tavani, a cura di L. e C. Rossi, Roma 2015, pp. 125-140.2 Matthaei Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani: Historia Anglorum, ed. Sir F. Madden, London, Longmans, 1866, p. 376. This Latin formula is to be found frequently in the Gesta abbatum as well, as referred to cultivated minds, see for instance the note penned by Matthew into the margin of the Gesta Abbatum in which the author does term King Alfred ‘Magnus’: Rex Alfredus (…) Hic, meritis suis exigentibus “magnus” dicebatur.3 Cfr. Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani A Thoma Walsingham, regnante Ricardo Secundo, compilata, ed. by H. Th. Riley, Cambridge Library Collection Rolls, 2012, p. 217.

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of inventio. She was a woman who had at heart her own memory, who was able to offer a writer the kind of literary help that went far beyond simple patronage, and was competent enough to guide, educate and in-spire the ladies of her Abbey who, as Clémence of Barking did, parodied Tristanesque romantic passion. She even used the vocabulary, if not the ethos, of fin’amor in a mystic context, as the other anonymous nun of Barking did in her Life of Edward the Confessor.

During the last ten years, in various books and papers, I have endeav-oured to identify Marie de France as the younger sister of Thomas Becket.

Marie de France is an intriguing personality, because she is a rare ex-ample of a twelfth-century woman author who through writing made a claim for her own authority in vernacular clerical culture, aligning herself with the circle of Canterbury scholars, the eruditi Sancti Thomæ, those philosophers (li philosophe, as the poetess calls them in the prologue to the Lais), whose main purpose was to establish traditional, genealogical and religious foundations for courtly Anglo-Norman society.

On the one hand, we know nothing about the first woman writ-er in Old French beyond her name, Marie. On the other hand, we can retrace the biography of Marie Becket, the younger sister of Saint Thomas, who was named abbess of Barking by King Henry II in 1173 (the same year as her brother’s canonisation), who appears in the docu-ments among the Canterbury scholars and who spent seven years in exile in France.

As the daughter of a merchant from Rouen brought up in London, this Marie could plausibly define herself as being a Francigena (a juridi-cal term in Latin which meant ‘subject to laws of Normandy’), or “de France”, and nonetheless be familiar with the linguistic and cultural mix characterising twelfth-century England.

As the sister of Henry II’s friend and chancellor Thomas Becket, she would have been in proximity both to the Plantagenêt court and to the intellectual circles around the archbishop of Canterbury, including John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, and Walter Map, whose interests included preoccupations identified in the texts attributed to Marie. Her associa-tion with Barking – a monastery populated by members of the anglo-

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norman élite, where women translated saints’ lives into French – and with Wilton Abbey, closely related to Ely Cathedral, where the cult of Saint Aethelthryth or Audrey4 was fostered, offer further evidence to support her identification5.

Barking Abbey witnessed extensive hagiographic activity during Marie’s abbacy and the ladies who made Guernes «quite fat, each of them with her own gift»6, were writers as well.

Analysing the surviving iconography of Mary Becket, especially the stained glass Becket windows in Notre-Dame de Chartres (fig. 1), whose pictorial program dates back to the thirteenth century and was desig-nated by John of Salisbury himself, a one-time secretary to Thomas, we discover that Marie Becket is the only woman among the scholars of Canterbury being chased from England. Significantly, she has not been portrayed with her family, but among the eruditi sancti Thomæ (as Herbert de Bosham calls the learned men who had assembled about the saint dur-ing his lifetime), suggesting her importance within this cultural circle.

She wears fashionable thirteenth century garments, including a bar-bette (chin strap) and a tourette (flat tart-shaped hat) and carries a book in her left hand.

4 Marie is the signature appended to four ancient French literary works, dating back to the twelfth century: Lais, Fables, Espurgatoire Seint Patriz and La Vie Seinte Audree. Whilst there is consensus about attributing the first three to the same author, the controversy over Marie de France’s possible authorship of the Vie Seinte Audree dates back at least to Richard Baum’s 1968 study. In 2002, June Hall McCash put forward a revised theory about this au-thorship. The poem, probably a team work supervised by an old Marie, in which her stylistic mannerisms are clearly recognisable, has come down to us from a single source and is consist-ent with the pattern, which is common to all her works. La Vie Seinte Audree fits well with the educational plan prepared by the Becketian coterie and about which Herbert de Bosham speaks at great length in his Latin life of Becket, as a plan to laicise ecclesiastical culture.5 C. Rossi, Marie, ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie; Maria di Francia: la Storia oltre l’enigma, Bagatto Libri, Rome 2007 and Marie de France et les érudits de Cantorbéry, Editions Clas-siques Garnier, Paris 2009.6 E les dames m’unt fet tut gras, / Or ‹e› lur duinst Deus tuzdis a tas. The dedication to Marie Becket is extant in the Parisian manuscript BNF fr. 13513 (fol. 98r).

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This woman can only be Marie, since the other two sisters of Thomas, Agnes and Roheise, were not literate7.

To the left of the stained glass window are two men wearing short, belt-ed tunics and carrying clubs over their shoulders. To the right is a group of five or more people. Most of this group seem to be facing toward the right but looking back at the men with clubs to the left. One of the men at left has his hands on the shoulder of the leftmost man in this group. 

The way in which Becket’s life is represented in the Chartrian stained glass program suggests a highly selective, politicised understanding of

7 Agnes, married the lord of Hills-Court, an archiepiscopal knight enfeoffed on the great manor of Wingham. Roheise appears to have been a widow at the time when her name first comes before us. This was on the occasion of King Henry’s penitential visit to the martyr’s tomb in July 1174, when Guernes tells us that the King entreated forgiveness of St. Thomas’s sister, and in redress (for his supposed concern in the murder) gave her a mill, which brought her an income of full ten marks a year. She settled in Canterbury with her sons Ralf and John after her brother’s murder.

Fig. 1 - Chartres Cathedral – early 1200s, Becket Window showing the persecution of Becket’s familyand friends, who were forced into exile after Becket himself fled to France. Marie Becket is among theeruditi of Canterbury

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events leading to his murder and canonisation. «Moreover, it has been sug-gested by Alyce Jordan that John’s [i. e. John of Salisbury] writings housed at Chartres helped to guide the choices made by the program’s designers for its general themes, as well as for the specific events portrayed therein»8. Consequently, the presence of Marie among the eruditi Sancti Thomæ can only be seen as a form of acknowledgment of her intellectual stature.

Marie also appears among Becket’s eruditi, again with a book in her hand, but wearing a simple blue veil (her portrait is surprisingly similar to that of Marie de France in the BnF, Arsenal Library, Ms. 3142 fol. 256r, fig. 3), in one of the four surviving leaves (fol. 2r) of the illuminated Vie Saint Thomas le Martyr by Matthew Paris, now in the Getty Collection9.

8 A Companion to John of Salisbury, edited by Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, vol. 57, 2014, p. 103. Alyce Jordan, Thomas Becket in the Windows of Sens and Chartres, lecture at Arizona State Uni-versity, 2006. See also Claudine Lautier, Les vitraux de la cathédrale de Chartres: reliques et images, ˝Bulletin Monumental˝, 161 (2003), pp. 3-96.9 Matthieu Paris, La Vie Saint Thomas le Martyr, ed. by C. Rossi, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2008, p. 26.

Fig. 2 - Becket Leaves, fol. 2r

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The Becket Leaves consist of four double-sided pages with scenes from the life of Thomas Becket (Fig. 2), accompanied by rhyming French cou-plets telling the story of the conflict between Becket and Henry II. The rest of the manuscript, which dates back to the 13th century, has been lost, and the pages are not all sequential.

As I have tried to demonstrate in 2008, in my edition of these leaves, the Latin and French captions and texts are rarely synchronised with the miniatures. The text is often entirely contained on a folio that precedes or follows its miniature. For instance, the text that begins in the second column of fol. 1 concerns Becket’s interaction with Pope Alexander III, which is illustrated and captioned on fol. 4.

The gap between the poem and its miniatures and the need for the art-ist and scribe to bring them closer together explains why there are only two columns of text on fol. 2r-2v. In this second folio, the caption to the draw-ing reads: S. Th. auditis enorm[it]atibus, reos excommunicat (St. Thomas, having heard the transgressions, excommunicates the defendants).

In the illumination Thomas is announcing the excommunication of his enemies to his friends and to Marie, who responds with a blessing

Fig. 3 - Marie de France, from an illuminated manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: BnF, Arsenal Library, Ms. 3142 fol. 256

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sign, with three fingers pointing upwards toward the sky. The three-finger salute, with the fingers in the form of the Christogram signifies God Bless You. The fingers spell out “IC XC”, a widely used four-letter abbreviation of the Greek for Jesus (IHCOYC) Christ (XPICTOC).

Although scenes from the life of England’s most popular Saint were sec-ond only to the lives of Christ and Mary as a subject for alabaster panel cycles, such as those from Nottingham, now in the British Museum, in the Victoria & Albert Museum and in a private collection, it should be remem-bered that, unsurprisingly given the zeal of Henry VIII’s lieutenants after the King ordered the destruction of all Becket memorabilia and portraits, very few images of the Saint have survived in the United Kingdom, with the exception of the profusely illustrated Queen Mary –and Luttrell Psalters.

In France, apart from some enamelled caskets from Limoges produced after his swift canonisation in 1173, and a number of manuscript illumina-tions mostly showing the very same martyrdom scene, only the stained glass Becket windows in Chartres, Sens and Angers have survived the destructive fury of the revolutionary Vandals who devastated the country in 1793.

For this reason, given the scarcity of Becket images, it is significant that two persons who had first-hand information about his erudite sister are responsible for her portrait together with St Thomas’s learned men.

Both John of Salisbury, who had met Marie Becket in person, and Matthew Paris, one of the most influential historians of the central Middle Ages, gave precise instructions so that Marie could be portrayed as a litterata.

It is noteworthy to mention that in the BL Royal MS 2 B VII, the so called Queen Mary Psalter, the fourteenth-century English psalter named for Mary I of England, who received it in 1553, the fragile memory of Marie as a litterata is inexorably lost10.

10 Only two sisters of Saint Thomas are depicted in this psalter, in various folios, from 292v, where we can see a bas-de-page scene of king Henry II ordering all Thomas Becket’s kin to be banished, to f. 293v and 294, where Thomas Becket and his family cross the Channel in a boat, going into exile in France where, with the women carrying infants they continue their journey on foot, and finally welcomed and blessed by Thomas.