TRADITIO STUDIES IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL HISTORY, THOUGHT, AND RELIGION Editors EDWIN A. QUAIN CHARLES H. LOHR RICHARD E. DOYLE R. E. KASKE Editors Emeriti STEPHAN KUTTNER ~ ANSELM STRITTMATTER BERNARD M. PEEBLES VOLUME XXX 1974 ——$—$—$—$—_$—$—_$_—_$_—_————_ THE ARCHITECT'S COMPASS IN CREATION MINIATURES OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES By JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 1974THE ARCHITECT’S COMPASS IN CREATION MINIATURES OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES* It has long been believed that pictures of the creator marking out the universe with a compass, common in late-medieval manuscripts, were inspired by Wisdom 11.21 which says of God: ‘Omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere dispo- *l Yet anyone who examines the forty-odd? creation scenes with compass * Shorter versions of this study were presented at the 1970 meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature and at the 1971 conference on Medieval Studies, Medieval Institute of Western Michigan. The photographie expenses for my research were supported by a grant from the Committee on Aid To Scholarly Activities of Sir George Williams University. I am indebted to Dr. Rosalie Green of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, Miss C. M, Hall, of the British Museum and to Mme Jacqueline Sclafer, of the Bibliothtque Na- tionale, Paris for advice and aid. 1 See Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Duirers ‘Melencolia I’: Eine quellen - und typen- geschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig-Berlin 1923) 67 ff. and in conjunction with Raymond Klibansky, the same authors’ Saturn and Melancholy (Edinburgh 1964) 339-340; Anthony Blunt, ‘Blake's “Ancient of Days”: The Symbolism of the Compasses,” JWCI 2 (1938- 1939) 53-63; H. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore (London 1952) 196, n. 93; Lynn White, Jr., ‘Ellmer of Malmesbury, an Eleventh-Century Aviator’ Technology and Culture 2 (1961) 101-102, and, most recently, A. Heimann, ‘Three Mustrations from the Bury St. Edmunds Psalter and their Prototypes,’ JWCI 29 (1966) 46-56, especially 52, where, however, she420 TRADITIO extant in psalters, horae, picture Bibles and other manuscript books will see quite clearly that only seven of these pictures illustrate literally the processes of weighing with scales, measuring, and numbering, as mentioned in the Book of Wisdom. The majority simply show God holding a compass with his handi- work before him, and seem to have been inspired by the opening chapters of Genesis — in which there is no compass — or by Proverbs 8.27, where God sets not a compass but a circle upon the face of the deep. Certainly, the absence of any source for this instrument in Genesis raises a number of interesting questions as to its use in creation miniatures. Does the compass have a sufficiently important role elsewhere in Scripture to have in- fluenced the illustrators here? Do Latin commentators on the Bible suggest that the compass was used in the act of creation? Were there any non-exegetical writers who used it thus? Were there pictorial sources which might have in- fluenced the illustrators? Actually, the answers to all of these question are not as illuminating as one might expect. Little is said about the compass anywhere in the Bible. The term for a pair of compasses — cireinus — occurs only once in the Vulgate, in Isaiah 44.13, in a description of the making of idols by misguided men. Two passages in Scripture which are closer in sense to the narrative of the miniatures with which we are concerned are Proverbs 8.27, where God sets his circle, gyrus, on the face of the abyss, and Job 26.10, where he compassed, circumdedit, the waters with bounds. Naturally, one wonders if Latin commentary on these passages may have influenced our miniaturists. In the handful of commentaries and glosses on Proverbs collected in the Patrologia Latina — those ascribed to Salonius, Paterius, Bede, Peter Damian, Bruno Astensis, and in the Glossa Ordinaria associated with the circle of Anselm of Laon—we find no discussion of the gyrus. Nor does thirteenth and fourteenth connects the compass with Isaiah 40.12. To my knowledge, only Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York 1964) 35 and n. 37, sees the importance of Proverbs 8.27 for the compass creation miniatures. 2 My count is based on miniatures examined at the Princeton Index of Christian Art where the cut-off date is 1400, as well as several after that date which I have come upon elsewhere. Doubtless there are additional miniatures in private collections and in uncatalogued MSS. Compass creation scenes appear in Berlin Staatsbibl, ‘Theol. Lat. Fol. 149, fol. I Brussels Bib. Publique 9004, fol. 1; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum J. 48, fol, 10b; Harvard College Typ. 201 H, fol. 1"; Chantilly, Mus. Condé 1045, fol. 1"; Dublin, Trinity Coll. Mise. E, I. 40 fol. 59°; Eton Coll. Mise. 177, fol. 1°; Hague, Kgl. Bib. 734. 43, fol. 3; Hanover, Kestner Museum, Eadwi Codex, fol. 9"; London, B. M. Royal 2.B. vii, fol. 1"; Royal 1. E. vii, fol. 1%; Royal 15.D. iii, fol. 3; Royal 19.D. iti, fol. 3; Add. 47682, fol. 2+; 15245, fol. 3%; 38116, fol. 8%; 15268, fol. 1%; Cotton Tiberius C.vi, fol. 7°; Yates Thompson 20, fol. 1"; Lyon, Coll. Gillet, fol. 1"; Montpellier, Bib. de la Univ. 298, fol. 300; Oxford, Bodlelan 270%, fol. 13 Ash- mole 1523, fol. 116%; Paris, Bib. Arsenal 647, fol. 77; B.N. Fr. 247, fol. 15 Fr. 20090, fol. 3%; Fr, 22912-13, fol. 2%; Lat. 11935, fol. 5; Lat. 11560, fol. 96; Lat. 12117, fol. 106; Bib. Ste. Genevieve 1028, fol. 14; Prague Univ. Library 23.C. 24, fol. 17; Rome, Vat. Reg. Lat. 12, fol. 68°; Toledo, Bib. del Cabildo, fol. 1¥; Turin, Bib. Naz. I. I. 12, fol. 4"; Valencia, Cath. 4-25, fol. 37°; Vienna, Nat. Bib. 1179, fol. 1%; 2554, fol. 1°, What appears to be the fron- tispiece of an MS of Boccaccio, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, c. 1430, was published in Pantheon 9 (1932) 39, I have been unable to discover the present whereabouts of this manuscript.THE ARCHITECT'S COMPASS 421 century exegesis — the Postillae of Hugh of St. Cher, the unpublished glosses on Proverbs of John of Varzy (B.N. Lat. 464), Guerric of St. Quentin (B.N. Lat. 15604), Stephen Langton (B.N. Lat. 384), Jacques of Lausanne (B.N. Lat. 14798), William of Auvergne (Arsenal MS 84), William of Alton (St. Omer MS 260), and the Explanationes in Proverbia Salomonis of Thomas Ringstead, for example — connect the circle or compass with creation. Only Hervé of Bourgdieu has anything to say about the compass of Isaiah 44,13 and his gloss merely clarifies the Biblical text for a medieval audience. “Circinus,’ he says, ‘autem vocatur inde quod circulum efficit vergendo, et est ferrum duplex, unde pictores faciunt circulos.’® Early commentators on Job: Augustine, Gregory Phillip the Priest, Bruno, and Rupert do not interest themselves in 26.10. This survey then, indicates that we must look elsewhere than to Latin exegesis for information about our compass. ‘Though the compass and the image of the circle drawn with it were not un- common in non-exegetical medieval writing, there are no instances of its use which seem to have been especially suggestive for the painters of the compass creation scenes. Geoffrey of Vinsauf had used the compass metaphorically in a discussion of inventio: ‘let the mind’s interior compass circle the whole extent of the material."* More common was the idea, which first appears in the Middle Ages in the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, that God is a ‘sphaera. . . cuius centrum est ubique,”® a concept sometimes associated with creation. For ex- ample, Bartholomacus Anglicus explained that ‘uniuersitatis etiam conditor, scilicet Deus in circulo designatur.’* Probably the best known use of the com- pass, however, is to be found in Dante’s Paradiso XIX 40-41, where God is described as ‘colui che volse il sesto/allo stremo del mondo.”? But the date of the Commedia, as well as the lack of interest in the passage by illustrators of and early commentators on the poem, rule it out as much of an influence on our miniatures. Indeed, it is more probable that Dante used the technical term for a pair of compasses — sesfe — because he had seen the sort of pictures in which God holds a compass. The access of Dante’s age to the ideas of Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy through Latin translations of the Greek originals or of Arabic versions may also have contributed rather generally to the popularity of the compass as an image among medieval writers. How much these newly available astronomical, geo- metrical, and geographical treatises may have influenced the pictorial vocabulary of Latin miniature-painters, is, of course, hard to judge. During the twelfth century there were Latin translations of Euclid by Adelard of Bath and Hermann of Carinthia? and a translation directly from Greek into 3 Commentariorum in Isaiam libri octo, PL 181.424. 4 Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsau/, tr. M. F. Nims (Toronto 1967) 17. 5 Ed. Clemens Baeumker, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und theologie des Mittel- alters 25 (1928) 208. On the subject of this topos, see Georges Poulet, The Metamorphosis of the Circle (Baltimore 1966) xi-xxvii. ® De proprietatibus rerum (Frankfurt 1601) Book XIX, eh. 127, p. 1285, 7 Bd. M. Barbi et al., Le Opere di Dante (Florence 1960). 8 On Adelard, see G. H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (Cambridge, ‘Mass. 1927) 20-42, On Hermann, see Hubert L. L. Busard, ‘The Translation of the Elements of Euclid from the Arabic into Latin by Herman of Carinthia,” Janus 54 (1967) 1-140.422 TRADITIO Latin of Ptolemy’s Almagest made about 1160 in Sicily.? Euclid’s work would naturally give rise to an interest in the compass, and indeed, as we shall see, it is this instrument which often serves as the symbol of Euclidian geometry in medieval art. Ptolemy’s astronomical and geographical work with its emphasis on arcs and circles would tend to associate the compass with the measurement if not the creation of the universe. Though un-illustrated in the text,“one of the fuller manuscripts of the Latin Aliagest, Vat. Lat. 2056, contains very extensive geometrical figures in the margins. In the thirteenth century we note considerable interest in geometry and astro- nomical measurement, especially at the court of Frederick II, Michael Scot had translated the De motibus celorum of Al-Bitrdjl by 1217 and we know that the emperor himself offered various geometrical problems to Moslem mathematicians for solution." Frederick’s chief minister, Petrus de Vinea, in a biting satire on the Dominican and Franciscans in the entourage of Pope Gregory IX, referred to certain of them as so scientifically inclined that they preferred to speak of Aristotle and Aristarchus instead of Matthew and Mark and Cum deberent populum ad bonum hortari, Quaerunt cur oportuit sphaeram rotundari Et quaerunt de circulo si posset quadrari!? ‘When we turn to medieval art the only places other than our creation mini- atures where the compass commonly appears in a symbolic or emblematic role, is as an attribute of the virtue of Temperance,! and, not surprisingly, as an attribute of Geometry in the iconography of the seven Liberal Arts. In the words of Martianus Capella, who first formulated their attributes, Geometry is a ‘femina luculentam radium dextra, altera sphaeram." Geometry’s radius was variously understood as a compass or graduated rule, and as a result she some- times appears in art holding a compass in one hand and a rule in the other. Often we find her in the company of Euclid; both figures are surrounded by spheres, ® Haskins, Studies 157. 1 See Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot (London 1965) 22-31 and F. J. Carmody ed. Al- Bitrajt De Motibus Celorum: Critical Edition of the Latin Translation of Michael Scot (Berke- ley and Los Angeles 1952). 11 See Haskins, Studies 242-320, especially 265. 1 See J. L. A. Huillard-Bréholles, Vie ef Correspondance de Pierre de la Vigne (Rp. Rein- heim 1966) who edits this poem 402-417. The quotation comes from 414. 38 See Lynn White Jr., ‘The Ieonography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technol- ogy’ in T. K, Rabb and Jerrold E, Seigel, eds. Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe (Princeton 1969) 207-8 and fig. 4. 14 See Adolf Katzenellenbogen, ‘Representation of the Liberal Arts’ in M. Claggett ef al. eds. Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society (Madison 1961) 39-55 and Philippe Verdier, ‘L’Iconographie des arts libéraux dans l'art du moyen Age... .’ in Arls Libéraux et Philosophie au Moyen Age: Actes du Quatritme Congrés International de Philosophie Médiéoale (Montréal-Paris 1969) 305-355. 4 A. Dick ed. Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philotogiae et Mercuri (Stuttgart 1969) ‘VI 580 289. On geometry generally, see B. L. Uman, ‘Geometry in the Mediaeval Qua- Grivium,’ Studi di Bibliografia e di Storia in Onore ai Tammaro de Marinis (Verona 1964) IV, 264-270, 273-285 and W. H. Stahl, ‘The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella’ in Aris Libéraur 961-962.THE ARCHITECT'S COMPASS 423 rhombs, squares and triangles.” Her compass suggests the power of the human intellect in measurement while the compass of Temperance suggests measure or the mean as that virtue’s goal. Both portraits can be discounted as direct pietorial sources for the creation scenes in which God holds a compass because ‘Temperance and Geometry are generally personified as women and they do not create anything. With this rather unpromising review of possible sources behind us, I should like to turn now to our primary evidence: the pictures themselves. As I men- tioned earlier, there are two types of scenes in which the creator is shown with a compass, and they are iconographically quite distinct from each other. The earlier, which I shall call the Wisdom type because it appears to have been inspired by the Book of Wisdom, makes its first appearance in the Eadwi Gospels, probably painted at Winchester about 1025 (Fig. 1). Here we see the hand of God stretched down over the earth, The compass and the balances illustrate the measuring and weighing mentioned in the Book of Wisdom; the separated first and second fingers, although a variant form of the Latin blessing, may also symbolize the act of numbering. ‘Three other manuscripts: the Tiberius psalter, probably also from Winchester and dating from the middle of the elev- enth century,” a Bible, B. M. Royal 1. E. vii, and Prague 23. C. 24, show some- what more complex versions of the same scene (Figs. 2, 3, 4). In Figs. 2 and 3 we see the circle of the world surmounted by the nimbed head of God. Thecom- pass, balances, and outstretched fingers are similar to those details in the Eadwi Gospels, but as the artists were painting cycles of illustration for Genesis, they added the two trumpets which issue from God’s mouth to represent the spiraculum vitae of Genesis 2.7, and the bird on the face of the waters to repre- sent the Holy Spirit of Genesis 1.2. Three other manuscripts contain copies of the Tiberius miniature, or of some lost common ancestor; they are probably all English.*8 In the miniatures of the Wisdom type no special emphasis is given to the compass; it is no bigger, or more dramatically presented, than the balances or the trumpets. The later, generally French, group of compass scenes shows quite a different organization and iconography, suggesting new interests on the part of the illus- trators and those who directed them. The archetype of this group appears to have been the frontispiece in a Bible Moralisé found in the Bodleian Library (Fig. 5). Both the style of its iustrations — its roundels are similar to the win- dows of La Sainte Chapelle, Paris, made about 1240 — and its moralizations borrowed from the Postillae of the Dominican, Hugh of St. Cher, point to a date about 1240 and to a northern French and Dominican milieu for the work- 16 See Domenico di Bartolo, Canzone delle Virti e Scienze, Rome, Galleria Nazionale, Gabinetto delle Stampe, fol. 13, ‘Geometria’. These drawings are discussed by J. Dominguez Bordona ‘Miniaturas bolofiesas del siglo x1v,’ Archivo Espaitol de Arte y Arqueologia 1 (1925) 177-188 and published by Sergio Bettini, Giusto de Menabuoi e U’Arte del Trecento (Padua 1944). ¥ See Francis Wormald, ‘An English Eleventh-Century Psalter with Pictures,’ The Walpole Society 38 (1960-1962) 1-13, 18 They are Bury St. Edmunds Psalter, Vat. Reg. Lat. 12, fol. 68; Berlin Staatsbibl. ‘Theol. Lat. Fol. 149, fol. 1; and B. N. Lat. 11560, 96".424 TRADITIO shop which produced it2? Several miniatures, closely modeled on the Bodleian ‘Bible Moralisé, exist as frontispieces for other Bibles, for example two Bibles ‘ow in Vienna (Figs. 6, 7). In all of them the compass is prominent, while there are neither the balances nor the dominating, numbering hand to connect such pictures with the Wisdom type. In the fourteenth-century Holkham picture Bible and in a fifteenth-century Guyart des Moulins version of the Historia scholastica we find variant poses (Figs. 8, 9). In Fig. 8 God sits on the disc of the world with his left hand extended to the cireles of the heavens in which the newly created sun and moon are visible. ‘Above him is the heaven of the blessed, below, the mouth of hell. In Fig. 9 the artist seems untroubled by the apparent incongruity between the garden in which God is standing and the newly created world disc before him. The differences of two centuries are reflected in the greater versimilitude and more complex exemplification, the more illusory pictorial space of these two miniatures as opposed to the rather frozen abstraction of the early Gothic Bible Moralisé. Teonographically, however, the differences are minimal. God, the large comp, and the newly created world are still the central elements of the composition. ‘The compass has actually become part of the work of the six days in a psalter from the British Museum (Fig. 10) and in a manuscript of Augustine's Cily of God (Eig. 11). The psalter, dating from 1280, is close in conception to the Bible Sroralisé archetype, though its iustrator, assigning the compass to the work ot the second day, focusses our attention on the Christ-Logos in the maies‘as ‘Domini pose who dominates the main roundel, In the Augustine miniature, the creator is shown in his more customary standing pose, actually engaged in his handiwork; the compass is an emblem of the creation itself. One last example demonstrates what might be called the decadence of the compass tradition. In another des Moulins Historia scholastica, dating from 1411 (Fig. 12), God stands on the globe of the earth; at his feet are depicted the waters. His gown studded with stars represents the crystalline heavens and His flame- colored glory the empyrean. Behind him is the inchoate void peopled with demonic forms. Tn depicting literally the chaos from which the world was created, this mini- ature makes explicit something which T believe was implicit in all of the mini tures of the second group, namely a metaphoric conception of God as an architect ar artisan forming the cosmos from unorganized matter. The idea of God as crehitect of the universe had a long history. We find it hinted at in Plato's Tunaeus and elaborated in Philo and in the Midrash on Genesis. It reaches its most developed medieval form in the writers of the School of Chartres.” In the De opificio mundi, Philo develops the idea that God first created an intelligible world of ideas which he then used as a pattern for the less perfect material world. Philo, following Plato, emphasized the artificer-like nature of 1 See A. de Laborde, tude sur ta Bible Moralisée illustrée (Paris 1911-1927) V 30, 82, 443-154, on which the information in this paragraph is based. 20 On the fondness for metaphor in the expression of religious ideas at this time, see M-D. Chenu, La Théologie au XIIF sidele (Paris 1957) 159-90. On the School of Chartres generally, see J. M. Parent 0. P., La Doctrine de ta eréation dans Vécole de Chartres (Paris-Ottawa 1938); Tullio Gregory, Anima Mundi: La Filosofia di Guglielmo di Conches e la Scuola di Chartres (Florence 1955); and Edouard Jeauneau, ‘Notes sar VEcole de Chartres,’ Studi Medievali 5 (1964) 821-865.