Fulgour said:
note to Ross: Please forgive me if I seemed to be
playing tit for tat. I simply entered Ferdinand and Isabella
in Google Images. And too, you've great links as usual!
O no, Fulgour, I meant it as a light-hearted "tit for tat", not mean at all. ;-)
I know that the symbolism of right and left is important in Ecclesiastical ceremony, and has always been. The sides of the altar, which hand to use doing what, which direction to swing the censer, which direction to circumambulate - all are laid down. It seems inconceivable that it would have been unimportant for those who created royal ceremonial - who were surely usually clergy. The details of who sat where on official occasions was important. It still is, but I don't think the organizers of meetings of modern heads of state and the like consider the *symbolic* importance of right and left.
BoPeep's observation just seemed plausible, and when checking it I did find more often than not that when portrayed together, the queen is to the left of the king. I have a nice picture book on the French monarchy and of a dozen or so such pictures, through the ages, only two show it the other way around. So it's not necessarily a monolithic practice, I'll grant you, but it seems to be a pattern.
Even in your picture of Ferdinand and Isabella, there are anomalies that could lead one to think that the original carving from which the print was taken was intended to show the queen on the left.
We might first suggest, just to raise a gratuitous doubt, that the print has been shown laterally transposed (Kaplan's transposition of the Rosenwald sheet in Vol. I of the Encyclopedia is a notorious tarot-related example of this). Since there are no letters on the print of Ferdinand and Isabella, it is impossible to say that this was not done.
If this is not the explanation, then there are internal anomalies, at least in my mind, that make me want to think that the print intended to show a distinction between right and left (just to make a mountain out of a molehill, as this is becoming
The action goes towards the king's left; the monk is kneeling on his left, and the book is being delivered into his left hand. This seems unusual to me - is it known that Ferdinand was left-handed?
Since the carving itself would have shown it with everything going to the right, with the queen on the king's left, it seems plausible to me to suggest that the carver carved it as he thought it. It's obviously a very skilled woodcut, so we can't imagine that the carver was stupid.
Perhaps, then, it means that the carver thought that for the audience that would see the picture, the subtlety of the symbolism wouldn't be important. Or, perhaps he just didn't think about it when he carved it, since there are no inscriptions.
Either way, I can say that in the majority of cases, there does appear to be a rule about putting the queen to the king's left.
There is a book with English coronation protocol, first codified in 1307, called the "Liber Regalis". They must say something about it in there, since there is a section for when a king and queen are crowned in the same ceremony, but I can't find a copy on the internet. There used to be one, I printed it out during Elizabeth's 50th anniversary, but it's not around anymore. Pity.
Ross
