16th c rosary sightings, and other interesting notes, in the Belgian museums

[abendgules]

Just for fun while we were in Bruges and Ghent, I started noting the different styles of rosaries that were shown in the late-period paintings. It gave me something to focus on while studying the rich and startlingly clear and crisp images of the 'Flemish Primitives', which is the collective description for those painters who worked around the same time as Van Eyck in the late mid-15th and early 16th centuries.

So here are my findings. All of the rosaries I noted were rounds (rather than straight strings).

Unfortunately no cameras, bags, jackets, etc etc were allowed into the Groeningmuseum, so I had to hunt up the images online afterward in Vlaamsekunstcollectie. My Flemish is crap, so bear with me (search is in English, descriptions are in Flemish). 

ETA: sorry about the crap links. Use the advanced search from the link, and enter the inventory number to find the pieces I saw.

You can zoom on these images, but the enlargements aren't great - too low-res.

Master of the Holy Blood, active 1500-1520, inventory no 1991.GRO0008.I
Madonna with SS Barbara and Catherine (allows zooming, in popup window)

Rosary of coral beads on long cord, hanging from the knot of her blue sash, over a black gown.
Agnus Dei medallion at the bottom
6 decade beads visible, and they're filigree beads (look like 2 halves of a cast bead maybe?) about size of a fingernail

Jan Provoost, 1462-1529, inventory no. 0000.GRO0216.I-0218.I
Death and the Miser (2 two-part images)  (a miser trying to give Death an IOU, very good, then the donor and his wife at prayer, with a bishop and St. Gudula watching over them)

Very long rosary of coral beads, about 8 decade beads of shiny gold, though possibly more, because the top of the rosary is hidden by the woman's gown. HUGE gold cross at the end, with pearls on pins in the ends and the corners of the cross, and in the corner of the arms of the cross.

Gerard David, active 1502-1508, inventory no. 0000.GRO0035.I-0039.I
Baptism of Christ (triptych)  

This is a large triptych, with Christ being baptised in the middle, and the donor with his sons on the left side, and his wife and the daughters on the right side, both sides being watched over by handy saints.

The donor's wife has a rosary of large gray filigree or what I'd call a birdseye pattern if it were woven, separated by BIG gold filigree decade beads. At the bottom is a simple Latin cross, with 4 pearls in the joints.

The donor's daughter has a black bead rosary w/ a medallion at the end, and large faceted gold beads for decades.

On both, the pendant appears to be in the middle of a decade, with 5 'normal' beads on either side, which I thought was a bit unusual.

In the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent:

Anonymous Master, c. 1480-1490, S. Netherlands
Holy Trinity with Donors and Saints , inv. no. 1973-AE

The wife(?) of a donor has a rosary w/ the cross visible. You can see 6 beads between decade beads. Oddly, the cross is not centred between decades, but is next to one of them. There's also 1 additional pendant that looks like a rock w/in a gold base. You can see two other 'rounds' on one side of the rosary, suggestiong 6-7 rounds total for the whole piece.

One non-rosary related observation: a crown perched on top of a travelling hat.

Master of the Prelate Mur, c. 1450
Adoration of the Magi , inv. no. 1903-E

The magi have arrived to worship Christ, and one of the leading travellers has flung down his hat in his haste to get to his knees.
His hat is shaped a bit like a Robin Hood hat, but the crown is rounder, more cylindrical, and has a pointy nipple on top. And within the brim of the hat, you can see his crown.

I mention this because SCA royals and royal peers tend to wear crowns and coronets on top of other headwear, regardless of period practice. I particularly dislike the wearing of coronets on top of straw sunhats, as I think it's looks very silly.

Judging from portraits and illuminations, kings and queens did not always wear their crowns. But the SCA convention is that anyone entitled to a coronet will wear it, particularly if they're on the throne.

This is the first example I've found of a crown within anything other than a cap of maintenance-style head covering.

I don't know if this is a good example: the Magi are not typical folk, they're decidedly exotic, and obviously Not From Around Here. This may be an example of their Strange Foreign Ways - so outlandish, that they wear crowns over their hats. Or maybe it's to help identify them - like a big arrow indicating that these guys aren't just wise, they're royalty too.

But I thought it was nifty to see anyway.

Comments

[ethnowoman.livejournal.com]

Gah! I have never seen a coronet on top of a straw hat and I hope I never do! I'm deeply sorry for your eyeballs.

[bend-gules.livejournal.com]

This is a classic at Pennsic: you need the straw hat to protect you, but you can't *possibly* not have a coronet, or else noone will know You're Important (tm).
I especially see it on the marshals on the fighting field: I think a coronet (and a white belt) improves fighters' responsiveness to marshals' directions.

[suelet.livejournal.com]

Your links are all bringing me to the same intro page. Right now I don't have the brain power to navigate it find the images.

Now that I have a coronet *blink* one of my biggest problems is the "when" to wear it. Historic practice seems to dictate that I would ONLY wear it on special occasions (which is kind of my leaning) but those who saw fit to actually make sure that I got it like to see me wearing it. I suppose that once the shiny wears off of my having it, people will be less insistent. It's the often problematice "historic practice vs. SCA culture" issue.

And, yes, the coronet under a straw hat thing is just dumb.

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Teehee! My eyes always go straight to the beads in any picture that has them! Can it be that I'm now corrupting someone else with my bad habits??!?!? {giggle}

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Nice! Too bad the pictures online are on the small side.

Having the cross/pendant in the middle of a decade is not terribly unusual -- at least I've seen it elsewhere. The Van Cleve altarpiece of the death of Mary that I saw in Köln shows the same thing. (Link here.

Interestingly, the same does not appear to be true of tassels, which usually *are* between decades. (But I'll be looking harder to confirm that ;)

[nusbacher.livejournal.com]

I've just made a five-decade rosary with the beads I bought in Singapore -- red coral beads with big yellow sponge coral decades -- and I put my dear old St George gaud on it. I decided that when you say the beads, you get to the end of a decade (little bead), go to the next bead (big bead) say a paternoster, and then a gloria (the gaud) and you're done (signalled by the amen at the end of the gloria). Then the next thing after the gaud is the first little bead of the first decade. It looks a bit odd, and you can understand why people started adding the drop onto rosaries; but if the gaud hangs in the middle of the decade you COULD use it as a sign that "this is the last decade, ready for the big finish; but it doesn't really seem practical.

[nusbacher.livejournal.com]

And as to crowns...

... I think of Henry II in The Lion in Winter and I try to imagine him telling his valet to stick a crown on his hat before riding out hunting ...

... and I just don't see it.

It's an interesting point because there are some pretty coronal headdresses at the end of the 14th and in the 15th Century but you still see an actual pointy crown turning up on somebody's head when a painter wants to say "hic est rex".

Coronets are pretty not-mediaeval anyway (the arched ducal (and not archducal) crown on my de Taahe flag is a Holy Roman Empire palatine duke's crown for this reason), which is why I've quite liked things like the jewelled circlets that Aedan and Kaffa wore when they were baron and baroness of Septentria: not pointy, not really coronets in the modern sense of peers hiring spiky hats from Asprey's at coronation time, but still saying "hic est baro et hic est baronix" when the occasion demands.

I'm sure you know my lack of tolerance for SCA rubbish as opposed to mediaeval practice, I'm sure that coronets contribute to the SCA's chronic hatlessness (and the obnoxious circlet-on-a-rag headgear), and I wonder whether collars could virally spread as an alternative to tin hats.