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| Cristobal de Villalpando, The Holy Name of Mary (detail) Mexican, c. 1685-1690 Mexico City, Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe |
History, and its related discipline the History of Art, are
funny things. You may start off
researching one thing and suddenly find yourself looking at something
completely different. I had this
sensation a couple of years ago, when I first began research on the image of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I discovered
that the familiar image had a long pre-history, well before Saint Margaret Mary began
to see visions of Jesus displaying His heart .1 Similarly, the coincidence of the subject of
a painting in an exhibition of the works of Cristobal de Villalpando
at the Metropolitan Museum and the feast day honoring the Holy Name of Mary led
me on an exploration with astonishing vibes.
Like the Marian title of Our Lady of Victory the feast of the Holy Name
of Mary is related to the long struggle of European nations against the Muslim
Turkish Empire.
For a little more background, we need to realize that Europe
fought a long, long struggle against aggressive elements of Islam. It has been argued, beginning in the early 20th
century with the historian, Henri Pirenne, that, although the barbarian
invasions of the fifth century did great damage to the western Roman Empire, they are not the event that divided the southern Mediterranean world from the northern half.
Pirenne’s theory was that remnants
of Roman Imperial administration and Roman trade survived the fall of Rome
and continued to function to a limited degree between northwestern Europe and North Africa and the Levant during the period
from the fifth to the seventh centuries. But, in the mid-seventh century, began the sudden, rapid conquest of the region south of the Mediterranean by aggressive Islamic armies sweeping out of their
home in Arabia. The armies of Islam that conquered Egypt and then all of North Africa to the shores of
the Atlantic and swept on into Spain by the early eighth century (711) dealt the remnants of the old Empire a final blow. The western Mediterranean
became closed to north-south shipping. Communications
and trade virtually stopped. For example, papyrus,
an early form of paper, which had been imported to Europe from Egypt prior to
this, ceased to exist in Europe and parchment, made from the hides of cattle,
became the norm.2
Modern Europe has largely forgotten that the tide of aggression
engulfed all of Spain, save for a tiny enclave in the northwest, and pressed on
into France. It was finally stopped at
Tours in 732 by armies led by Charles Martel, whose grandson Charlemagne established
the great Carolingian Empire in the ninth century. From then on western Europe was spared
invasions from the south, although still having to deal with invasions from the
north, i.e., the Vikings, and from the east, i.e., the Slavs and Magyars.
After the victory at Tours, with the establishment of the Carolingian Empire
and apart from the Viking invasions there was a reasonably peaceful climate in
most of Europe, for the next several centuries.
There were small territorial wars between the emerging feudal kingdoms
and between rival feudal lords. With the
exception of Spain, where sporadic fighting between the dominant Muslim
culture, centered on Cordova, and known as Al Andaluz, and the remnants of the
Visigothic Christian kingdoms in the northwest, known as Castille, Leon and
Asturias continued for centuries, Europe was generally internally peaceful.
However, there was
war in the Levant, centering on the area of Palestine which contained the holy
city of Jerusalem. The region was lost by
the Greek Christian Byzantine Empire, which centered on its capital of
Constantinople, in a single battle in 636.
The Byzantines continued to hold a line in Anatolia, in present day
Turkey, with frequent skirmishing, while the victorious Muslims established a
caliphate at Damascus, in present day Syria.
By the late fourteenth century, however, the native
dynasties derived from the first wave of Islamic expansion had been swallowed
up by a tide of newcomers, the Turks. They burst upon the scene in the
mid-eleventh century. Converts to Islam, they took seriously the call to wage
holy war which had begun to falter in the Arabs and pressed it so vehemently
that by 1453 they had crushed the Byzantines, destroying the Byzantine Empire
and turning Christian Constantinople into Muslim Istanbul.
In the centuries that followed this victory they invaded and subdued
Greece and the Balkans, including Transylvania, conquered eastern Hungary
and had extended their armies all the way to the gates of Vienna, twice. The first siege, led by the great sultan Suleiman
the Magnificent, in 1529, failed, although Suleiman retained control of the
territory the Ottomans had conquered up to that point.
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| August_Querfurt, The Turkish Army Besieging Vienna Austrian, c. 1750-1760 Private Collection |
The second siege, in 1683, was very nearly an Ottoman
victory. After two months of siege by
the Ottomans, under the command of Kara Mustafa Pasha, and several allied
armies from areas where there was great antipathy to the Austrian Habsburgs, the city was in an extremely desperate
condition. The besiegers, encamped before the walls of Vienna, vastly outnumbered the defenders, Emperor Leopold I and many of the citizens of Vienna had already evacuated.
Then, in early September a relief force
from Poland, led by King Jan Sobieski, joined forces with armies coming from some of the
German states. However, this assembled
relief army was still only half the size of the attacking Ottomans.
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| Artur Grottger, Meeting of King Jan III Sobieski and Emperor Leopold I near Schwert Polish, 1859 Lviv, National Museum |
Nonetheless, an attack by the relief forces,
plus the confusion caused among the Ottomans by having begun the battle fighting on two fronts (on the one hand with the
relief armies, while on the other continuing their attack on the city) began to break
the enormous Ottoman army.
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| Anonymous, Siege and Relief of Vienna in September 1683 Austrian, After 1683 Vienna, Heeresgeschichtlichen Museum |
Towards
evening of the day of battle the largest cavalry charge ever recorded, spearheaded by the famous
Polish winged hussars led by their king, finally broke the Ottomans for good and permanently lifted
the threat coming from Istanbul.
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| Martino Altomonte, Relief of Vienna Italian, c. 1685 Herzogenburg, Herzongenburg Monastery |
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| Modern depiction of King Jan Sobieski and the Winged Hussars From the 2012 film "Day of the Siege" |
The Polish king had placed his forces under the protection
of the Polish Madonna of Czestochowa, the famous “Black Madonna”. Mass was celebrated before the Polish army went into battle, blessed by their king.
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| Juliusz Kossak, Jan III Sobieski Blessing His Troops Before the Battle for Vienna Polish, 1871 Color Lithograph |
As had happened after the decisive defeat of
the Turkish navy at the battle of Lepanto, a little over 100 years earlier (October
7, 1571), Pope Innocent XI established a feast in honor of the Virgin Mary on
the date of the battle. 3 The siege of
Vienna was raised by the battle outside Vienna on September 12, 1683.
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| Jan Matejko, Jan Sobieski Sending a Message to the Pope Following the Victory at the Siege of Vienna Polish, c. 1882-1883 Vatican, Vatican Museums, Sobieski Room |
Although the feast day was established there was not an
immediate outpouring of images related to it. There had, in fact, already been
some iconographic images of the Holy Name of Mary in preceding centuries, as
there was already an established devotion to the Our Lady under that title in
the territories of Europe and the New World that were under Spanish rule.
Previous images that included the name of Mary had focused
on the words of Luke 1:28 for the Angel Gabriel “Hail Mary, full of grace” (“Ave
Maria, gratia plena”).
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| Simon Marmion, Annunciation From a Book of Hours Flemish, c. 1475-1485 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 6, fol. 21r |
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| Neroccio de' Landi, Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalene Italian, c. 1490 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Simon Bening, Madonna and Child From a Book of Hours Flemish (Bruges), 1531 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 451, fol. 97v |
Apparently, it was only around the year 1600 that artists
began to focus literally on the name
of Mary, usually depicted as the monogram “MRA” and sometimes shown with the
monogram for Jesus “IHS”. Occasionally,
the two monograms are superimposed on each other to create a compound
image.
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| Michael Snijders, Monogram of Maria MRA, made up of Marian symbols Flemish, c. 1608-1630 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum |
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| Martin Baes, Names of Jesus and Mary in Latin and Chinese Dutch, c. 1614-1631 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum |
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| Paolo Naldini, Angels with the Names of Jesus and Mary Italian, 1633 Rome, Church of the Santi Nomi di Gesu e Maria, Cappella Maggiore |
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| Attributed to Guglielmo Borremens, Adoration of the Name of Mary Italian, 1721 Palermo, Church de Immacolata Concepzione al Capo |
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| Johann Christoph Handke, Adoration of the Names of Jesus and Mary Czech, 1744 Gross-Ullersdorf, Castle, Small Chapel |
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| Jan Punt after Jan de Wit after Peter Paul Rubens, Four Angels Celebrating the Name of Mary Dutch, 1759 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum |
It is clear from some of the contexts that the monogram is an actual substitute for an image of the virgin, as in the print in which the annunciation of her birth to her father, Joachim, is imagined as an instance in which an angel shows him the monogram of Maria instead of a figure of his soon-to-be daughter.
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| Johan Esaias Nilson after Johann Evangelist Holzer, Annunciation of Mary's Birth to Joachim Dutch, c. 1765-1770 Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum |
In my several week search of image resources the one truly
dramatic image of the title that I have found is the one by seventeenth-century
Mexican painter, Cristobal de Villalpando, that I mentioned in the beginning of
this essay image which was displayed in the Villalpando exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. In this really
beautiful picture Mary kneels before a golden object, which may be the Ark of
the Covenant (to which she is frequently compared).3 She is surrounded by angels and archangels,
who play musical instruments, while in the background a further countless throng
of other angels, vaguely seen, surround her into the depths of the picture
plane. Her face is lifted adoringly
toward the heavens, where her monogram appears in glory. And around her head, instead of the
traditional halo is a band, lettered in light, which reads “El Dulcissimo Nombre
de Maria Santissima” (“the sweetest name of the Most Holy Mary”). Thus, the name of Mary is doubly honored, in the
presence of Mary herself.
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| Cristobal de Villalpando, The Holy Name of Mary Mexican, c. 1685-1690 Mexico City, Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe |
What is particularly intriguing in this picture is the date,
between 1685 and 1690, which is to say, just a few years after the Battle for
Vienna and the establishment of the feast of the Holy Name of Mary for the
entire church. Can its somewhat startling iconography be a
reflection of these events?
© M. Duffy, 2017
*Please note that this essay refers to a past exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which took place between July 25, 2017 and October 15, 2017.
- See: "The Sacred Heart of Jesus—An Iconographic Introduction" at
http://imaginemdei.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-sacred-heart-of-jesusan.html - Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne, Translated by Bernard Miall, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1939. Available on the internet at https://archive.org/stream/HenriPirenneMohammedCharlemagne/PirenneMohammed#page/n3/mode/2up
- For this see: "Our Lady of the Rosary, a Forgotten Battle and an Almost Forgotten Pope" at
http://imaginemdei.blogspot.com/2016/10/our-lady-of-rosary-forgotten-battle-and.html - Brown, Jonathan; Gomar, Rogelio Ruiz; Kasl Ronda, et al., Cristobal de Villalpando, Mexican Painter of the Baroque; Mexico City, Palacio de Cultura Citibanamex-Palacio de Iturbide and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, p. 62.
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