St. Lorenz, Nuremberg

Saint Trophime, Arles

Fiddling

If you're looking for the links that were in the overcrowded sidebar, look up. They're now on separate pages, linked from under the header. I've been sick of that damn sidebar for months. Transferred the Babelfish and Paypal buttons to the bottom of the page while I was at it. They look ruddy awful down there, but they can stay until this blog becomes a full-scale website devoted to my opinionated view of the medieval world. Hopefully, if all the fur and feathers settle in the right way, that should be by the end of 2011.

Avignon

Saint Trophime, Arles

Mont-Saint-Michel

Quote of the Day

"There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s." -- Thomas Babington Macauley

Annunciation

Rogier van der Weyden
Pietro Cavallini
Lorenzo Monaco
Jan van Eyck
Robert Campin
Gerard David
Barthelemy d'Eyck
Conrad von Soest
Gentile da Fabriano

Candlemas

Stefan Lochner

Rogier van der Weyden
Bartolo di Fredi

Fra Angelico
From the Menologion of Basil II
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Memling
Duccio

Glastonbury

The Adoration of the Magi

By Jacques Daret
From the Hours of Henry VII, by Jean Poyer.
From the Hours of the Marechal de Boucicout.
From the Hours of Etienne Chevalier, by Jean Fouquet.
From Notre Dame de Paris.
From the Siysky Gospel, 1339.
From Saint-Urbain, Troyes.
By Heironymus Bosch.
By the Master of Sigmaringen. ( Translation from art history gobbldegook: "We don't know who he was, but we're getting tired of calling everyone Anonymous." )
By Hugo van der Goes

Let's Get Our Facts Straight: Tonantzin, Eh?

Seriously, People! Does this.......

.....have anything in common with this?

If you think they look alike, I'd have to ask what you've been drinking. Yet both can be addressed as Tonantzin. Why? Because Tonantzin is an honorific, not a name. It means "our revered mother." I could easily address Our Lady of Guadalupe that way. On the other hand, I'd have no problem addressing Coatlicue, the tough looking customer in the bottom picture, as Tonantzin, either. Wouldn't want to end up as part of her necklace , now, would I?

All over cyberspace, we see Our Lady of Guadalupe presented as a syncretized version of "the Aztec goddess Tonantzin." Some accounts even rip the image off the tilma to create a beautiful, loving goddess who never existed. The truth is that there never was an "Aztec goddess Tonantzin." The story comes from shoddy research and overactive imaginations. All Aztec goddesses could be called Tonantzin because it was a title of respect.

It was perfectly natural for Our Lady to be called Tonantzin; "Our Revered Mother." It wasn't syncretism, it was more a translation from Spanish to Nahuatl. It wasn't a case of an oppressed people hiding old beliefs under new forms, but of an oppressed people reaching out for new beliefs and adopting them as their own. It certainly wasn't a case of "imperialist" Spaniards forcing their religion on people who desperately wanted to cling to their beloved old gods. To insist on interpreting the devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in that way, in the absence of any confirming evidence, is to imperialistically impose the notions of our own time on people who are no longer around to tell us we're off our gourd. As for them, all we can say with certainty is that they loved their new Tonantzin.