Details, details....

Sometimes we're lucky, and someone has published books with BIG pictures of paternoster beads -- like the book with the St. Anthony pictures I was talking about awhile back. But when we're not so lucky, about the only way we can really study depictions of beads in detail is to travel to where the original paintings are and take some closeup photos ourselves. (Then again.... maybe that's a GOOD thing? {grin})

Anyway, since I had the opportunity, I've extracted and enlarged some of the photos I took recently that show details of beads. These are especially for my friends who do reproduction metalwork, some of whom I know (hope?) are contemplating making some of the types of beads and rosary parts that are not to be found on today's market. (Hint, hint!)

I've had an especially hard time finding on the modern market anything like the large, pierced, silver or gold beads, the originals of which were probably pomanders, filled with some fragrance-producing substance. Judging by how common it is to see one of these rosaries with one very large metal bead, these must have been very popular historically. Unfortunately for us, most of them were probably melted down for their precious-metal content when they went out of fashion. Surviving large beads are more likely to have been carved of boxwood or ivory, which don't melt.

But most of what's on the market right now in the way of pierced metal beads is either (1) too small to stand out as gauds on a string of 10mm to 14mm beads, or (2) of some Victorian or Art-Nouveau design that just doesn't look right.

Once in awhile, I'll find some large pierced-metal balls -- especially around Christmas -- but the only difference is that instead of being too small and of the wrong design, those tend to be too big and of the wrong design. They seem to start at about 3 inches in diameter and go up from there. The pomanders I see in paintings seem to be between about an inch and two inches in diameter. (And while I'm at it, I'd wish for reproduction pomanders that were plated base metal rather than solid silver, so they would be somewhat affordable.)

So without further ado, here are some nice details.

This one is from a painting I didn't get a good photo of overall, because the lighting kept creating spots of glare where it reflected off the varnish. (My detail photo isn't completely sharp, either.) Her identity is unknown and so is the name of the artist, but this was clearly half of a pair of marriage portraits. Note that her beads are black, possibly jet.

(As always, click on these photos to enlarge them.)



I've mentioned this one earlier, but here it is enlarged as far as I can:



The by-now-very-familiar-to-me artist Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder painted another pair of these marriage portraits in 1528, this time of a Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrum -- Gerhard Pilgrum and his wife Anna Strauss Pilgrum. (They can easily be identified because their coats of arms are part of the picture.)

I am somewhat embarrassed by this photo. The online photos of these portraits that I was able to find are all extremely dark or very "off" on the colors. I took this in daylight, so the colors are much better. Unfortunately, this pair of portraits is displayed inside a glass case -- which reflects -- and directly facing a large wall of windows, which provides a lot of light to be reflected. I've managed to fade the impression a bit, but you can clearly see a reflection of me taking the photo -- especially since I happened to be wearing a nice, bright white shirt that day. {blush}



I was almost equally embarrassed to suddenly realize while I was there that Bartholomäus Bruyn actually lived and worked in Cologne -- I've seen a number of other "rosary portraits" that he painted, but I hadn't noticed where exactly they were from, since I found them on the Marburg Foto Index, which has things from all over Germany and beyond.

In this case, we get a bonus: not just one, but both members of the pair are holding beads. Here is a closeup of Gerhard's rosary:



And Anna's:



The closeup photos were actually easier to take, because I was able to move in close and block the light from the window behind me.

And finally, another rosary of red coral beads with a gold pomander. Sorry about the blur on this one too. (I've definitely decided after this trip, I hate my camera. I need a different one.)



This is from a portrait thought to be that of Maria Pastoir. Whoever the subject was, she was painted at age 45 in 1538. (Oh, and this photo isn't mine. It's good. ;)



Anyone studying German women's headdresses is going to want to collect all of Bruyn's portraits, because they have very good views of the folded and draped linen constructions popular on respectable heads at the time.

Pictures from Köln:

In living color
More living color
A Joos van Cleve altarpiece
Details, details

A Blessed Christmas

Here is my "Christmas card" for you, with a wish that everyone may receive the gift of joyful wonder at this season.

In my various travels -- real and virtual -- I am always enchanted to discover yet another image of the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus with beads. So many of these pictures were clearly painted by people who love and are well acquainted with REAL babies and how much they love to play with something so appealing to the sense of touch.

Infants approach the whole world with a sense of openness and discovery, as you'll know if you've ever tried to keep one from putting everything she encounters into her mouth. I have yet to see the Holy Infant shown actually chewing on beads, but I'm sure that's going to happen any minute now in some of the paintings I've seen. Fortunately, the beads are usually red coral, a good and harmless (if expensive!) choice for teething on.

This particular painting is a bit of a mystery. I've seen two versions, and while I'm no art historian, it seems fairly clear from the museum labels that no one is sure just who painted either one. I found the color version above on REALonline (which, annoyingly enough, I can't get to work at the moment, so I can't easily check what it says about the painter). My notes say it is tentatively identified as a copy after Joos van Cleve, but all I can see that this has in common with van Cleve's work is that he painted the same subject, the Virgin Mary and Infant Jesus. The style of the painting is quite different.

Then I found what seems to be a slightly different version of the same painting -- this one has a bit of landscape in the background, seen through a window, but the pose is identical:



This image comes from the KIK-IRPA (Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage) website, and the painting is in Liège at the Musée Curtius (which seems to be in flux and doesn't have a very organized website at the moment). The information on the KIKIRPA site attributes this one to the school of Joachim Patinir (1480-1524), which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either, considering all the paintings I can find online by him are broad landscapes with a few small human figures. So I don't think this is really his style either.

It sounds to me like the curators who wrote the labels were guessing. I'll be keeping my eyes open, and would welcome any further pointers. (So far I and my faithful readers are 2 for 2 on identifying mysterious paintings!)

I should mention, by the way, that for the purpose of creating a pretty "greeting card," I've done quite a bit of retouching and mending on the color image above. The original looked quite scratched and rather beat-up, and I've tried to smooth over the flaws while (hopefully) not destroying essential details like the folds and edges of the Virgin's very filmy and transparent veil. (I'm interested to see the Virgin's ears showing so clearly through her veil. It seems a bit unusual to see her ears at all -- usually they're completely covered. Aren't women's ears supposed to be rather erotic at this period?)

One intriguing feature that I think I can see a bit more clearly in the Belgian black and white image is the drinking glass on the side table. It's something of an artistic challenge to paint a transparent object, and the details don't come through very clearly in the color image, which is rather small. The black and white version shows a bit more detail including -- I think -- indications that we have here a covered cup, not a simple goblet. The detail below shows where I've lightened the image to show the lid -- I'm obviously meddling with the image here, but I'm following original details that I think I can see in closeup view.



There's a rather better detail of such a covered glass here.

Additional links

Previous Christmas cards:
Christmas 2006
Christmas 2005

An article about another painting by van Cleve which was altered later to include a passion flower

Mystery solved!

You may recall awhile back I posted about a mystery painting that I wanted to identify, especially since a closeup of a detail shows a figure -- probably a woman -- with a very interesting set of paternoster beads. Here it is again:



The mystery has been solved! Elizabeth Alles wrote me recently to say she'd found the source: an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, by Stefan Lochner, in the cathedral in Köln (Cologne, Germany).



Sure enough, there is my Mystery Lady, in the left wing of the open altarpiece, over there at the far left margin:



The best closeup view I can get from the online images is this:


There are two particularly interesting things about the beads in this painting. One, here's another instance of red coral beads with (this time) especially clearly painted gauds of clear, colorless rock crystal. I'm keeping track of instances of this combination, because it seems to be a favorite attribute of saints and holy people in paintings.

Also, here's a straight string of Christian prayer beads -- not a closed loop -- being carried by a woman. While I've seen women with this type of beads before, it's not at all common: generally women have loops and the straight strings belong to men. But not always, as this painting shows!

According to the Web Gallery of Art, this altarpiece was painted in the 1440s, not for the Cathedral (where it is now) but for the town council's chapel in City Hall. Though it doesn't look particularly large in the photos, it's huge -- more than 8 feet tall (260 cm). This explains why it's painted in sufficient detail that a small snippet of it, like the "mystery hands" bit above, is clear enough to use as the cover of a book. (This is on the cover of one of my main reference books, 500 Jahre Rosenkranz: 1475-1975.)

Not a lot is known about the life and work of Stefan Lochner, the painter. He was born in Meersburg am Bodensee in about 1400, and died in Köln in 1451, probably of the plague. There's considerably more information about him and about this painting in the notes from a University of Wisconsin art history course taught by Prof. Jane C. Hutchison a few years ago, available online here. A lot of his paintings are still in Cologne.

As for identifying the people in the painting, both wings of the altarpiece seem to show saints and holy people witnessing the central scene. Interestingly, only one figure on each side seems to have a halo. Why?

On the left, the haloed figure is almost certainly Saint Ursula, since she has that saint's attributes of a royal crown (Ursula was supposedly a princess) and an arrow (by which she and her companions were martyred). So it's likely that all the other women in the front rows of the crowd, including the lady with the beads, represent some of Saint Ursula's eleven thousand companions.

There are other people in the back who clearly have some other identity, since we can see their hats: there's a bishop's miter, and next to him a rather beehive-shaped hat worn by someone carrying a staff topped with a cross. I'd think that was a Pope, except that his hat doesn't have three rows of crown-leaves on it as the Pope's hat classically does. (Dr. Hutchison suggests some identities in her article.)

Ursula is specifically one of the patron saints of Köln, since that's supposed to be where she and her companions were martyred. That might explain why she's the only one wearing a halo in this picture. The others might be holy people too, but she is clearly special.

Logic would then suggest that the haloed man on the other wing of the triptych might be a special male patron of Köln. And sure enough, there is one: Saint Gereon (d. ca. 304), a Roman soldier, martyred with 290 others on order of the emperor Maximian for refusing to sacrifice to pagan gods to obtain victory in battle. (He's also the patron of people with headaches and migraines, a useful saint to know.) The figure in the triptych is certainly similar to other 15th-century German ideas of what a Roman soldier looked like: in fact, when I went to the saints index here, the image of Gereon is almost, but not quite, identical. The caption there says it's another image from a Köln painting (now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum), this one by an unknown painter in about 1480.

There's a pleasing symmetry to the wings of this altarpiece, Ursula with her many companions on one side and Gereon with the rest of his regiment on the other.

I did scan the painting for other interesting rosary beads, but didn't see any offhand. I always look, because if one figure is carrying them, sometimes others will too.

When Rosaries are Red

Someone asked me awhile back why I keep referring to all the "Big Red German" rosaries as coral -- especially given the (relative) dearth of surviving coral beads. We also see quite a few rosaries of red beads in other contexts, especially in the many (and anachronistic!) portraits of the Virgin Mary where the Infant Jesus is playing with his mother's string of red beads. Good questions all.

First, a caution: most if not all of the red beads we talk about are actually just accessories in paintings. So we are talking about something that is really -- literally -- just dots of red paint. There will always be some uncertainty about exactly what they are supposed to represent. Here's a fairly typical example by Joos van Cleve: Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1527.



Second, we have to weigh the question of how realistic the painter was trying to be. Paintings are not photographs, and we know that many painters don't paint exactly what's before their eyes. For instance, we sometimes see rosaries shown with peculiar numbers of beads -- 28, 39, 16. It's very likely that at least some of these are the painter's version of "how many beads will fill up this space in the painting and still be big enough that you can see what they are."

Mostly the reason I think these rosaries are supposed to be coral is that red coral shows up in many documents as a material popular for rosary and paternoster beads. Coral was popular enough for paternosters that the Dominican Order had to make a rule in 1260 that friars could not carry paternosters of coral or amber (both luxury materials). Coral is also used for other decorative purposes, including adult jewelry and the peculiar table-top sculptures called "coral gardens" -- miniature landscapes made of valuable mineral specimens, precious materials and jewels, including coral "trees."

Mentions of carnelian and other reddish stones, by contrast, seem to be fewer. For carnelian in particular, apparently a lot of carnelian is more orange to yellow as it comes out of the ground: in modern times, it's routinely heat-treated to turn it redder and darker. I don't know whether this was done -- or whether it was possible -- in the Middle Ages.

Certainly you'd expect that some who couldn't afford the real thing would purchase cheap imitations of red coral instead. Again I'm speculating, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find red glass used this way. (And perhaps more practical than the real thing -- genuine coral is rather soft for a semi-precious stone; glass is harder, though heavier). Nor would I be surprised to find wood or bone beads dyed red, or perhaps an "inferior" type of coral given the same treatment. That's certainly happening today: I think it's fair to say you can assume any "red" coral you buy these days has been dyed -- unless a very reputable supplier is certain that it wasn't. The genuine "gem quality" red coral is terribly scarce now and horribly expensive: a rosary made from it would probably cost $600 or more.

To the point, however: The other reason I think most of the red rosary beads in paintings are supposed to represent coral is that they are painted in the same style as other beads we _know_ are supposed to be coral. The closest and best examples are the many pictures of the Infant Jesus where he is _not_ playing with a rosary, but has a string of red beads around his neck.

A string of coral beads was, and perhaps still is, thought to be an appropriate gift for a baby over much of Europe, because coral has been regarded as having protective properties against the "Evil Eye." For that matter, a good-luck charm representing a coral branch, called a corno or "horn" in Italian, is still sold for adults in Mediterranean countries (although now it may be made out of plastic). The Virgin Mary here has simply given her baby a protective necklace as would any good mother. Here's a version by Joos van Cleve (Flanders, 1507-1540), the same artist who painted the secular portrait above.



The clincher for infant necklaces is when we notice how many of them have a pendant that is clearly a branch of native coral -- perhaps somewhat shaped and polished. In that distinctive color, and in that kind of context, it really can't be anything else.

More Mystery Hands

I'm pleased to have solved the first Mystery Hands that I've mentioned here, but they aren't the only ones in my collection.

I'm particularly intrigued by this picture, which graces the cover of my paperback copy of 500 Jahre Rosenkranz, the catalog of the 1975 exhibition in Köln (Cologne) celebrating the 500th anniversary of the rosary.



I can plod, but not skim, through a passage written in German: well enough to translate (with considerable help from a dictionary) a passage that looks interesting, but not well enough to spot a brief note on a specific subject. So if there's a mention in this book somewhere of the source of this cover image, I can't find it. I've looked in a few obvious places like the back of the title page, but with no success so far.

I'm especially intrigued by this image because I was once guilty of asserting that the combination of coral beads with rock-crystal marker beads was "common," and when challenged, I found that I couldn't come up with a good solid example. So I'd love to know who this is, who painted her (at least this certainly looks like a woman to me!), when and where.

Enlightenment welcome :)

Big red rosaries II

So as I mentioned last week, one of the things I did in preparation for the exhibit at the International Medieval Congress was to re-string a couple of my rosary replicas that I wasn't satisfied with.
I'd made a "Big Red Rosary" some time ago, because a string of 16-18mm red (dyed) sponge-coral beads came my way. I've always been fascinated by the huge coral rosaries that appear in a number of 16th-century portraits (see yesterday's entry for references). I'd found one large pierced silver bead at a gem show, which became my pomander:



To fill it, I made a small bag of black net and inserted it into the pomander with the mouth of the bag outside. Then I poked small bits of clove, cinnamon bark and allspice through the hole into the bag until there was a good quantity in there, sewed the bag closed, and tucked the top inside.

I've been looking at pictures and catalogs for more than two years, trying to find some silver beads that were the right size and a plausible shape for the marker beads, and that looked as though they were in something of the same style. Eventually I found some sterling silver "flying saucer" shaped beads I thought would do. I haven't seen this shape in any of the period portraits -- if anything, silver gauds in the portraits tend to be long double-cones instead -- but all the beads I could find in that shape were too small and much too fussy in their decoration.

At the same time, I found some silver end-caps for the pomander, since the wooden disks I'd used tended not to stay put, and also some silver-plated small beads to add to the string as "Zwischenperlen" (as the Germans call the "in-between" beads). Again, I haven't seen this exact combination in a portrait, but considering how many other strings of rosary beads have Zwischenperlen, it seemed plausible.

So here is the new configuration: longer, more glittery, and incidentally, also strung on a somewhat thicker and stronger silk cord, which makes me feel a bit safer wearing it.

And a closeup:



I think the wealthy 16th-century burghers' wives who owned the originals would approve :).

Mystery Hands

Many of the donors, bystanders and other contemporary people who appear holding rosaries in paintings are at a relatively small scale compared to the painting as a whole.

This means that the best way to show the beads clearly, in as much detail as possible, is to take a closeup photo of the person's hands and beads.

This leaves me with a certain number of "mystery hands" illustrations to ponder. These are closeups, often used for book covers or jackets, frontispieces or endpapers. They show wonderful rosaries, but often I can't find a mention of exactly what painting those hands belong to.

So you'll understand I'm happy to have attached one of my pairs of "mystery hands" to someone! They belong to Claus Stalburg (or Stalburger, or possibly Stralenburg), painted by the "Master of the Stalburg Portraits" in Frankfurt, Germany, in the early 1500s.

Here's the painting I was trying to trace -- and as you see, the copy I have is printed in black and white.



I don't even remember exactly what I was looking for in the Marburg Photo Index, but when I saw this portrait, I knew I'd found the right hands:



Claus Stalburg (1469-1524) was a member of the governing council of Frankfurt, and later Mayor. He married Margaretha Vom Rhein (1509?-1558?), who was some 40 years his junior. I'd be tempted to think she was his daughter rather than his wife, except that the portrait of her (if correctly identified) is clearly one of a matching pair, a common form of married-couple portraits. And of course such marriages were not unknown, or perhaps she was his second wife. Here's the pair of them:



And here is a closeup of Margaretha:



I'm interested in the rosary beads both of them are holding. Clearly they are very similar, but not identical. Hers seem to have five decades, rather than three (?), but the beads and pomander are smaller than her husband's. While both are fairly short loops, they seem to be of the same general type as the large coral beads shown in a number of 16th-century German portraits (see Big, Red and German; Big Berthas, It's a Guy thing, and Vicomte and Vicomtesse).

An extensive Web search finally turned up a very small pair of images in color -- small because they are advertising for large versions of the same images, for sale by Artothek.



And I was delighted to see that, while you can't see much detail in these little images, the beads are clearly that nice, bright coral-red.

Vicomte and Vicomtesse

As I mentioned in Seeking at Sotheby's, a pair of really nice paintings turned up of a married couple both holding red (presumably coral) rosaries. Interestingly, they're dated rather late for this type of portrait: 1624 and 1629 (most of the others I've seen are before 1600). Not only that, they're French; most of the others I've seen are German. They are identified by their coats of arms as the Vicomte and Vicomtesse d'Amphernet.

The Vicomte:



A closeup of his beads:



The Vicomtesse:



Her beads:



My guess is that this rather old-fashioned (by that time) kind of portrait was requested by the sitters because it was fashionable when they were younger. Here they're being painted at ages 75 (the Vicomte) and 64 (the Vicomtesse). Both are abundantly provided with furs, lace, and gold jewelry. This is clearly a portrait of marriage, success, status and wealth as well as piety -- exactly how they would want to be remembered.

Both paintings are unsigned and are in oils on canvas, each about 39 by 31 inches. Their earliest recorded sale is from the Chartreux de Lyon in 1877; they were bought by the family of Comte Max de Lalaing and sold again in 1953.

They were originally attributed to "Pourbus" but this is rather puzzling. The Pourbus family produced three generations of painters: Pieter, Frans I, and Frans II. But Frans II died in 1622, so if the dates on these paintings are correct, he couldn't have painted them.

Big Berthas

In an idle moment (well, maybe several moments) with a fast Internet connection, I've tried to find all the examples I originally saw in the Marburg Photo Archive at Bildindex.de of the BIG red coral rosaries I mentioned in Big, Red, and German a while back.

I've been saying they're "fairly common" for the wives of prosperous burghers in the 1500s, but exactly what evidence do I have to back this up?

Here are some of the ones that first caught my attention. (Clicking on each of these takes you to the 600k original photo at Bildindex):

All of these are by Bartolomaeus Bruyn the Elder (1493-1555), from Köln (Cologne), who painted at least twenty portraits of this type (not all with rosaries). The Cranachs and other contemporaries also painted portraits in this style.

Quite a few of them, like the first one, are pairs of portraits of a husband and wife. Some of these are probably betrothal or marriage portraits, especially if the people shown are young, or holding rings or flowers. Others may simply be tokens of middle-aged economic success.

Here are more of the Big Berthas.

I just found this one (1536, painter unknown):



This one is by Joos van Cleve:



Here is an unusually late one (1632) by Christiaen van Couwenbergh, whose usual portrait style is quite different. Seemingly this was a client who wanted something old-fashioned:



And for amusement, here's one being held by a doll!

Big, red, and German

One of the rosary fashions of the 16th century is for what I call the Honking Big Red Rosary . I've collected several portraits, most of which seem to be from the Germanies and Flanders, of ladies holding or wearing rosaries that appear to be at least two feet long -- and that's just the length of the loop, so the actual strand is at least twice that long.

When the portraits are in color, most of these rosaries are red, with gold or silver gauds. Red usually indicates red coral, extremely expensive both then and now. The gauds are at least as large as the other beads, and very often when you can see the whole thing there's also a pierced ball (a pomander, presumably) at least a couple of inches in diameter.



I've wondered for some time whether the beads were really that big, or whether the painters are exaggerating at the sitter's request -- the message being "Look what a big coral rosary my husband can afford." I haven't yet seen anything resembling a surviving example.

It's certainly possible that actual rosaries of this type could have been made of imitation coral rather than the real thing. Imitation precious stones and glass "pearls" are certainly common enough in period examples. There's a practical limitation, however: a string of beads of glass or semiprecious stone weighs half again as much as the same size of beads in coral. A string of 16-20mm beads of this size could weigh 11 or 12 ounces (3/4 of a pound), which might be too heavy to wear comfortably. Coral is much lighter than stone because it's basically constructed like bone, with lots of microscopic air spaces.

These big red rosaries are so spectacular that I just had to make a replica. I have a string of dyed "sponge coral" 16mm beads, and one pierced silver bead, which I've strung into a version of such a rosary (pictured below). I pushed a little bag made of nylon mesh into the "pomander" and inserted small bits of clove, cinnamon and allspice that would fit through the bead's opening, then sewed the bag closed. So the whole thing smells a little like mulled cider :).



So far I've been unsuccessful at finding silver gauds in the right size range that look good and go with the pierced bead I already have. It appears to be from India, so I'll keep looking: I expect a really big gem show is what I need to find.