The Empresses Bag? (Noblet)

[kwaw]

Perhaps between our iugler poet and the divine lady, the way of love is watermarked by veiled references...

The shell, as symbol of pilgrimage, was in fact a common watermark, to be found from at least the 15th century on ~ for example there is an example c.1477 in Harold Bayley's 'New Light on the Renaissance' on p.17 in chapter on religious emblems, where he also quotes Scott:

“Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage;
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

Kwaw

 

[DoctorArcanus]

“Therefore, let there be two Venuses in the World Soul, the first heavenly and second vulgar. Let both have love: the heavenly for contemplating divine Beauty, the vulgar for procreating the same in the Matter of the World. For such beauty as the former sees, the latter wishes to pass on as well as it can to the machine of the World."

I did not manage to read all the thread. Too much stuff in it
But I was fascinated by this quote, from Ficino if I understood correctly.

It made me think of the famous painting by Tiziano (1514) known as Sacred and Profane Love.
The profane Venus (left side) does look a little like Pamela's Empress

Marco

 

[DianeOD]

Fascinating

Wow - I think she's the same woman!


"She walks in beauty...
And all that's best of dark, and light, meet in her aspect and her eyes,
thus mellowed to that heaven'ly light which (..something..) to gaudy day denies."

- from memory.

 

[mac22]

Wow - I think she's the same woman!

sure appear to be.

mac22

 

[DianeOD]

Bag, scallopshell, shield 'of the face'

medieval Christendom's scallop-shell meant pilgrimage to Compostella. But its much older than Christianity as an iconographic motif.

Anyway, here's James of Compostella with pilgrim's emblems

and Hyginus' image with 'shield of the face'

 

[jmd]

If the depiction is of a shell (a different point to being able to perceive it as though it were one), then I would suggest that it would be far more clearly presented: there are just too many representations of these along so many of the Compostella routes making their way all across France towards the Pyrenees.

The 'Coquille St Jacques' ('St James's shell', as the scallop-shell is commonly known in French) remains significantly different in design and depiction.

 

[DianeOD]

Bag of gold/jewels etc.

I think the Empress' bag may be consciously meant as a bag of jewels and/or gold.

See passage from Manilius, which I'll put on the 'Foundation on the Empress' thread.

Its also enlightening, I think re the Visconti-Sforza figure. Makes me re-think degree to which V-S influenced by Manilius.

 

[mac22]

I think the Empress' bag may be consciously meant as a bag of jewels and/or gold.

See passage from Manilius, which I'll put on the 'Foundation on the Empress' thread.

Its also enlightening, I think re the Visconti-Sforza figure. Makes me re-think degree to which V-S influenced by Manilius.

Why a bag of jewels or gold? I'm a fan of bag of grain...

mac22

 

[kwaw]

The shell, as symbol of pilgrimage, was in fact a common watermark, to be found from at least the 15th century on ~ for example there is an example c.1477 in Harold Bayley's 'New Light on the Renaissance' on p.17 in chapter on religious emblems, where he also quotes Scott:

“Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage;
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

Kwaw

In the constellation of Deborah (DBRH=female ruler) there appeared in 1572 a new star:

"...This object was known for two centuries after its appearance as the Stranger, or the Pilgrim Star, and the Star in the Chayre, but by us as Tycho's Star, although it was first noticed by Schuler at Wittenberg in Prussia, on the 6th of August; again at Augsburg by Hainzel, and at Winterthür, Switzerland, by Lindauer, on the 7th of November; and on the 9th by Cornelius Gemma, who called it the New Venus..."

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer...nomy/_Texts/secondary/ALLSTA/Cassiopeia*.html

The shell as a symbol of pilgrimage in general was related to the route to Compostella in particular; in popular or folk etymology the name of Compostelle means 'field of stars'. Pilgrim routes were related to the path of the stars:

quote:
"Chaucer...conjoined Watlynge Strete - the popular name given to the pilgrim route between London and Canterbury - and the Galactic design of the heavens:

"See yonder, loo, the Galaxie,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey
For his ys whit (and some, parfey,
Kallen hyt Watlynge Street),
That ones was ybrent with hete,
Whan the sonnes sone the rede,
That Highte Pheton, wold lede
Algate hys fader carte, and gye.
(House of Fame II, 936-43)

Long before the Canterbury Tales or the Squires* crucial contribution to that work, Chaucer-the-poet had been forging textual connections between this pilgrim-route, that Phaethonic myth, and the course of the Stars."
end quote from Frese,p.176

(*Frese argues that the Squires 'steed of brass' is an 'astrolabic story horse' Chaucer's involucral use of which is "critical at that point to keeping the pilgrims, and their twenty-four 'tales', in proper horological order.")

Kwaw
Dolores Warwick Frese An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales University of Florida Press, 1991.

 

[kwaw]

"Chaucer...conjoined Watlynge Strete - the popular name given to the pilgrim route between London and Canterbury - and the Galactic design of the heavens...

"...the Milky Way was also known in southern Europe as 'la vie di San Jacopo' (the way to Santiago), and 'la strada di Roma' (the way to Rome), indicating an international convention of identifying the galactic course of the heavens with the familiar routes of religious pilgrimage on earth."

Frese, n.10 p.283

Kwaw
Dolores Warwick Frese An Ars Legendi for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales University of Florida Press, 1991