The
following post derives from my undergraduate honors thesis on a group of bone
horse saddles from the fifteenth century carved with scenes of courtly love,
knights, and dragons. While it may fit best under the heading of "Medieval," the project was formative for my current interest in Arms and Armor. My paper suggested
that the defined group of objects, traditionally associated with Kings
Sigismund of Hungary and his Order of the Dragon, were actually just the
surviving relics of a literary based fashion trend, of which a portion were
decorated with iconography relating to Saint George and protection from an
“other.” The purpose of this post is to
introduce the saddles and to briefly explore the meaning and significance of Saint
George in the iconography.
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Budapest, Hungarian |
These
words decorate the bone panels of a saddle belonging to a group of exceptional
works embedded within the spectacle of late medieval European court
cultures of display. A list of twenty-one such saddles first presented by Julius von
Schlosser in 1894 has since been added to by a handful of scholars.[2] Most
recently, twenty-eight saddles listed by Mária Verő in 2006 appeared in the
catalog of an exhibit on the court and patronage of Sigismund von Luxembourg.[3] While
ten examples of these prunksattel
currently reside in the United States and England, no significant studies
appear on them in English.
The
ivory saddle itself appears as an iconographical motif in French and English
literature dating back to the twelfth century. Bone saddles are pesented as
proof of wealth and royalty in Chrétien de Troyes' tale of Aeneas and Dido,
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the ballad of Thomas of Ercildoune.[4] In an
analysis of fictive Gothic ivories in medieval romances, Jean Campbell suggests
that the bone saddle mentioned in the tale of Aeneas was a product of the
poet's mind, and that "through a combination of literary convention and poetic
imagination, such glittering objects took on a life of their own in the pages
or medieval romance.”[5] Since
the surviving saddles all date from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries, it is likely that the literary saddles were inspirations for the
group that exists today. Whether or not the saddles from the twelfth century
existed, fifteenth century nobility wanted to emulate the wealth and grandeur
of legendary figures they read about in their preciously illuminated and illustrated manuscripts.
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| Tratzburg SaddleMetropolitan Museum of Art,
|
The
number of known extant saddles currently stands at twenty-nine.[6] They
are dispersed in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Bargello of Florence, the
Wallace Collection of London, and the Hungarian National Museum of Budapest.
The saddles are composed of wooden frames covered first in a layer of birch
bark, then raw hide and finally fastened with plates of ivory. Based on closer
examinations of the surfaces, particularly the marks left by the tools used in
carving, recent scholars determined that the saddles are carved from plates of
stag horn, a stronger material better suited for riding.[7]
Because of the traces of paint and evidence of gilt details, some scholars
hypothesize that the saddles were too ornate for use, and were merely acquired
for their value. However, the wear on the carvings and paint seems to prove
otherwise. They were most likely used, albeit sparingly, during victory parades
and ceremonial events. While the total list stands at twenty-nine objects, a
handful are of questionable authenticity and suffer from severe and sometimes
total damage to their pictorial programs. [8] Other
than their materials, shapes, and dates, the remaining saddles share many
iconographical motifs which will be briefly explored below.
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| Saint George and the Dragon detail, Kormend Saddle Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (69.944) |
Represented
in various forms battling various figures, the dragon appears on fifteen of the
saddles over thirty times. [9]
Extremely popular motifs in the middle ages, partially due to their frequent
mention in Latin and vernacular Bibles, dragons are attributes of pagan lands
and deserts. The dragon symbolizes moral and religious deviance and is a danger
to humans in both the material world and the spiritual world.[10] The
saddles show the creatures crouching into small spaces, spitting fire bolts,
and struggling with humans. Although their general popularity may account for
their presence, the numerous references to the legend of Saint George and seem
to offer a closer connection with the cult of the saint.
The
legend of Saint George and the dragon makes its first appearance in Jacobus
Voragine’s Golden Legend. George, a Christian knight, was deployed to a
city on the outskirts of the empire. Upon arrival, he discovered that the town
was under siege from a “plague bearing dragon” that lurked in the local pond.
Just as the king’s daughter was about to step into the lake to be sacrificed,
George rode in on his horse and gravely wounded the dragon. After tying the
dragon’s mouth shut, he made the princess walk it into the city where he
proclaimed that the only way he would kill the dragon was if all
twenty-thousand men were baptized and renounced their pagan ways in favor of
Christianity. Once this mass-conversion took place, Saint George, standing next
to the animal, struck it again and killed it, clearly a metaphor for having
struck and killed the society’s pagan ways.[11]
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| Saint George and the Dragon detail, Rhédey Saddle |
The identification of the knights on the saddles as Saint George is made easy
by inscriptions, details in clothing, and the presence of other figures from
the tale, such as the kneeling and praying princess. The reason for and meaning of his presence is slightly more complex.[12] The
chosen methods of depiction offer some clues as to his prominence. The images
of the Saint are divided into two groups; the Saint on horse wounding the
dragon, and the Saint on foot, post- mass conversion, killing the dragon. Four
depict the saint on horseback, spear in left hand and sword in the right, in
the process of attacking the dragon.[13] Two
of these saddles are of questionable authenticity, leaving two whose other main
themes are love and virtue. These saddles seem to have the Saint present to
elaborate on the chivalric aspects of the tale of Saint George. Six of the
saddles show the Saint on foot rather than horseback, implying that their
message was more closely related to the second half of the story in which the
mass conversion and not the valiant slaying of evil is the focus.[14] The
image of Saint George on foot with his lance speared into the mouth of the dragon
while its tail winds around the Saint’s foot was popular in fifteenth century
Central Europe and can be found on a wooden statue of Saint George in the
Nuremburg National Museum and on many contemporary stove tiles displayed at the
Budapest History Museum. This exact detail is also found on the saddles at the
Hungarian National Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,[15] which
was previously used to suggested that the saddles were linked to Central
Europe.[16]
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Budapest, Hungarian |
The
connection of these saddles with this region, specifically with the Kingdom of
Hungary has a long history. The nature and degree of this connection has long
been debated between German, Hungarian, and Italian scholars. At the moment,
the association of the saddles with the early fifteenth century order of
knights, Drachenordens, or The Order of the Dragon is stated as fact on
the informational cards displayed next to the saddles in the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, the Glasgow Museum of Art and others. The theory comes from the
presence of the symbol of the order, a dragon with its tail wrapped around its
neck, on the back cantle-lobe of a saddle in the Hungarian National Museum,
known as the Jankovitch saddle.[17] Founded
in 1408 by Hungarian King and future Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund von
Luxembourg, the Order served to defend Sigismund and Christianity against his
enemies to the South-East and at home.[18] The
name of the order comes from the legend of Saint George, and is also known as
the Order of the Defeated Dragon. The presence of this symbol has led many
scholars to believe that many, if not all, of the saddles were produced for
this Order, possibly as gifts for induction ceremonies.[19] This
conclusion is problematic and unlikely since the dates do not match and the
symbol itself was used for generations after the death of the King Sigismund by
the Hungarian nobility. The Báthory family of Hungary, whose members were
ranked highly in military, ecclesiastical and administrative positions, for
example used some version of the symbol in their family crest through the seventeenth
century. Whether or not the saddles have anything to do with the Order of the
Dragon, the presence of Saint George and the large number of dragons shows a
clear emphasis on protection from the world beyond the borders of Christianity.
This
emphasis on protection reveals itself in other aspects of the decorative
programs of the saddles. In addition to dragons, there are numerous composite
figures of griffins, lions, and human-headed creatures that often populate the
pages of bestiaries. While the dragons, griffins, jackals, and devils dispersed
in the imagery are aspects of the dangers beyond the physical borders, the
creatures with more human characteristics represent the borders of rationality.
On a saddle in the Hungarian National Museum there are two Wildmen representing
the inner beast. The randomly dispersed images of apes holding the hands of
women or flanking a pair of lovers in whispered conversation are
personifications of the irrationality of “foolish men who have been betrayed
into the power of women on account of their lust.”[20]
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Perhaps
the best example of a combination of pagan and irrational is the scene of
Aristotle and Phyllis on a saddle at the Hungarian National Museum.[21] The
aged Aristotle crawls on all fours with a young woman riding his back. Complete
with the girdle and whip, the scene depicts Aristotle caught by his pupil,
Alexander the Great, engaging in the same irrational acts that Aristotle warned
him against. It illustrates that women and love can turn even the wisest of men
into a fool. The tale originates from the East, specifically the Buddhist
Jataka Tales and was popular soon after its introduction in the west in the
thirteenth century.[22] On
the surface, the scene was read as a warning to men to be wary of the power of
women. Additionally, according to George Satron, any medieval commoner would
immediately recognize that “Aristotle had been a pagan. His shameful failure
illustrated … the vanity of philosophy, especially of that philosophy which was
as yet unredeemed by Christian grace.”[23]
Aristotle’s paganism presumably held special meaning in lands where Christian
monarchs struggled with holding back the non Christian kingdoms to the East and
quelling revolts in their own countries. While this seems to support localization
to a place with direct and complex relationships with neighboring
non-Christians, it must be mentioned that Aristotle and Phyllis are also a
favorite couple of the French, where patrons loved the intrigue of the story
and had just finished a string of crusades to try to tame the pagan lands.
Much of the remaining iconography on
the saddles deals with these same themes of love and lust. Lovers are seen on
nearly all of the figurally decorated saddles. Attempts made to identify the
specific sources for these scenes are for the most part inconclusive. It is
suggested that rather than coming from a few specific
sources, the scenes are an eclectic mixture of late Gothic romances from across
generations and geographic regions. Lovers found on the saddles are carved into
garden landscapes complete with gates, large overgrown flowers, symbolic
animals and couples in various stages of courtship.
The turbulent fifteenth century may have prompted the need to show imagery relating to the
defense of the borders of Christianity. The Ottoman were closing in on
the Balkans and the Hussite Wars were raging in Bohemia. The age
of exploration was at its height. The evocation of Saint George could be linked to a wider range of cultural issues untouched in the scholarly literature. In the future, I aim to explore these connections more thoroughly.
[1] Translated by (Grancsay 1937) Stephen Grancsay in “An Early
Sculptured Saddle.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 32, no. 4
(1937) 92-94. The saddle on which the motto is located in the appendix under
#1.
[2] Julius Schlosser, “Elfenbeinsättel das
Ausgehenden Mittelalters,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wein
15 (1894) 259-294.
[3] Mária Verő, “Bemerkungen zu den
Beinsätteln aus der Sigismundzeit.” In Sigismundus Rex et imperator: Kunst
und Kultur zur Zeit Sigismunds von Luxemburg 1387-1437. Edited by Philipp von Zabern, 270-278. Budapest: W-Press
Kft., 2006.
[4] Robert Brydall, “Notice of Armour and Arms at Eglinton
Castle, Three Scottish Swords, etc.” Transactions of the Glasgow
Archeological Society 4 (1903): 38-48.
[5] Campbell, C. Jean. “Courting, Harlotry and the Art of
Gothic Ivory Carving”. Gesta 34, no. 1 (1995): 11.
[6] In addition to the twenty-eight listed by Ver• in 2006,
there is another saddle made of wood that belongs to the group in the Wallace
collection, appendix number 25.
[7] Stephen Grancsay. "An Early Sculptured Saddle," The
Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 32, No. 4. (Apr., 1937) 94.
[8] Two saddles can immediately be removed from the list
because they are made of wood, covered in gesso and painted to resemble bone.
They are both identical replicas of a saddle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and were probably created in the late 19th century, when the production of fake
ivories was at its height. These saddles are in the Wallace Collection (inv.#
A415, in the appendix of this paper under #25), and the Musee l'Armee (G. 546,
appendix #26). For a discussion of gothic ivory reproduction in the 19th
century see: Barnet, Peter, ed. Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the
Gothic Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. (79) Another two,
one from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (accession #A 73, appendix #21)
and the other from the Deutsch Historisches Museum in Berlin (appendix #24)
have been placed into the category of questionable authenticity for this paper
because of their vastly different approaches to decoration and the lack of
technical skill in which they were executed, which may be due in part to bad
restoration. It is possible to suggest that these saddles were made at a later
date to mimic the others. Two saddles, one in the Deutsch Historisches Museum
in Berlin (accession #W1010, Appendix #22) and one in the Glasgow Art Gallery
and Museum (accession #E 1939.65.bx, appendix #23) have no figural decoration,
and instead are covered in stylized swirl motifs. These appear to have only the
shape and material in common with the saddles and will not be addressed here.
The damaged saddles are numbers 14 through 17 in the Appendix and are located
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wallace Collection in London, the Museo
Bardini in Florence, and formerly the Zschille collection, current whereabouts
unknown. While these saddles will not be addressed again formally, when in the
service of making a point, they may be listed as examples containing certain
images along with the other saddles.
[9] Dragons are found on saddles listed in the appendix under
numbers: 1-8, 10, 13, 18, 20, and 24-26.
[10] Louise W. Lippincott, "The Unnatural History of
Dragons," Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 44 no. 334 (Winter,
1981), 2-24.
[11] Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend. Ed. F.S.
Ellis. London: Temple Classics, 1993, 238-242.
[12] Three saddles mention Saint George by name in prayers
inscribed in the bone. Two saddles ask for the help and blessing of the Saint,
and one mentions him in a love sonnet. The original inscription in German on
the saddle with the prayer reads: "HILF, VOL AUF SAND (JO)RGEN NAM-ILF (?)
RITTER SAND JORG." The saddle is in the Appendix under # 15, The other
reads: ICH HOFF DES PESTEN. HILF GOT WAL AUF SAND JORGEN NAM. In the Appendix
under # 13. The love sonnet on the saddle in the appendix under #7 reads ALLAIN
MEIN ADER LOC GAR SEIN; RITT DAD JORIG; DICH LIBE GOT; HUERD?; ICH HAN NICHT
LIEBERE WEN SICH. The feathered diadem is discussed in conjunction with
medieval stove tiles from Eastern Europe by Anna Maria Gruia, "Saint
George on Medieval Stove Tiles from Transylvania, Moldovia and Wallachia: An
Iconograogical Approach." Studia Patzinaka, 3 (2006) 10. The
saddles with the diadems are in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Appendix #2),
and in the Hungarian National Museum (Appendix #5). The kneeling princess is
found on saddles in the Appendix under #s 3, 6, and 7.
[13] Saint George on horseback is shown on saddles listed in the
appendix under numbers 3, 6, 7, and 24.
[14] Saint George is depicted on foot spearing the dragon is
found on saddles in the Appendix under #s: 1,2, 4, 5, 8, and 20.
[15] Saddles in Appendix under #s 2 and 5.
[16] Eisler, János. “Zu den fragen der
beinsättel des Ungarischen Nationalmuseums II.” Folia Archaeologica 30 (1979):
211.
[17] Appendix # 3
[18] Gezá Nagy “Hadtörténeti Ereklyék a
Magyar Nemzeti Múzeumban.” Hadtörténeti Közlemények 11 (1910): 223-243.
[19] In support of this argument see I. Genthon, “Monumenti
artistici ungheresi all’estero.” Acta Historiae Artium 16 (1970): 5-35.) for an argument
against it see János Eisler, “Zu den Frangen der Beinsättel des Ungarischen
Nationalmuseums I.” Folia Archaeologica 28 (1977): 189-209. and János
Eisler, “Zu den Frangen der Beinsättel des Ungarischen Nationalmuseums II.” Folia Archaeologica 30
(1979): 205-244.)
[20] Keith P. F. Moxey, “Master E. S. and the Folly of Love.” Simiolus:
Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 11, no. 3/4 (1980): 125-148.
[21] Appendix # 5.
[22] George Sarton, “Aristotle and Phyllis.” Isis 14, no.
1 (1930): 8-19.
[23] (Sarton 1930, 11)
