Adam is dying, and Seth, his son, is given a branch of the tree of mercy by an angel in the Garden of Eden to plant in the mouth of his father: this was the opening episode of the popular Christian legend of the True Cross. (Piero della Francesca, The Death of Adam, Arezzo, 1452–66)
A powerful votive polychrome wooden Crucifixion hangs in the centre of the chapel above the main altar, and behind it, on either side of the tall lancet window on the narrow end wall, Piero’s programme continues to follow the fate of the cross after Christ’s death, as it despatches one enemy after another, like a dragon slayer in objective shape.
After a vision of the cross, the emperor Constantine fights under its banner and wins a famous victory at the Milvian bridge over the rival emperor Maxentius in 312; he is instantly converted to Christianity and orders the Roman world to follow him. He then despatches his mother Helena to the Holy Land to find the relics of the true cross, the material form of the sign by which he now lives. Helena finds out where the cross has been hidden by forcing a confession from a Jew who knows the secret. Significantly, his name is Judas – Judas Cyriacus – and the empress mother has him dropped into a dry well and kept there until he capitulates. On the back wall, Judas is being winched up from the well; an unbeliever of the same persuasion as Solomon, he then reveals the burial place of the three crosses used to hang Christ and the two thieves. Queen Helena has the area excavated – the theme of the central tier of the lefthand wall of the chancel. The true cross, the one on which Christ died, is then proved – identified – by the miraculous cure of a youth over whose naked, afflicted body it is held in blessing.
Opposite the victory of Constantine, Piero then deploys, in a choreographed sweep across the breadth of the wall, another triumph: the battle in which in the seventh century the emperor Heraclius defeated Chosroes, King of the Persians, an idolater and deadly enemy of Christendom (here). In this mighty frieze, banners fly above the heads of the warriors and horses in the mêlée – it is an army ‘terrible with banners’. Just to the left of centre, one flag displays an upright white cross on a scarlet field, the emblem of Christian chivalry and another epiphany of the Holy Rood, the protagonist of Piero’s scheme. Beside it, another flag, lying aslant the horizontal, is emblazoned with the head of a Moor in profile on an escutcheon; the same head then reappears above, painted on the crest of a knight’s heraldic helm three times larger. This flag is torn – for the Moor’s head hints at Chosroes’ infidel allegiance, though in 615, the date of the theft of the relics from Jerusalem, Islam itself was yet to be established. In the fresco on the opposite wall showing Constantine’s victory, the same heraldic Moor’s head appears among his enemy’s ranks.
Piero was speaking to a contemporary audience in the rhetoric of the Crusades – a language they shared: such insignia were familiar among the coats of arms of crusaders, several hundred years after Maxentius’ and Chosroes’ reigns, and were adopted to recall their struggles with a later stripe of unbeliever, the Saracens; they emblazoned such trophies on their family escutcheons. Caxton, translating The Golden Legend, calls Chosroes and his men ‘paynims’ – a word which in English then implied Mohammedan or Saracen. His narrative, like Jacobus’, was universalist in its reach, bringing enemies into contact with divine power; its principal dynamic, which often drives later spoken or written popular stories as well, is conversion: the conversion of its subjects from the unfamiliar to the familiar.
As Sheba is Queen of the South, Constantine Emperor of the West, so Chosroes rules the East and has dominion over heathens like the Moors of Islam. One by one, each incomer, each stranger, is represented succumbing to the inclusive powers of the Church, the outstretched arms of the cross, which annihilate what they cannot contain.
In the Song of Songs, attributed to Solomon, the beloved who speaks of her love to the king was traditionally identified with the queen. She says of herself, towards the beginning of the poem, ‘I am black, but comely …’ (‘Nigra sum sed formosa’) (Song of Solomon 1: 5). It is a telltale ‘but’, that ‘sed’ in the Vulgate translation. It functions to mark openly an oxymoron, which was only implied in the original Hebrew, in which V means ‘and’ as well as ‘but’. The Vulgate’s ‘sed’ betrays the Church’s ambivalence about blackness, the colour-coded livery of the underworld, and its double power of dread and fascination.18
In medieval European iconography, the biblical associations had inspired images of a Moorish Queen of Sheba: an enamel plaque on the altar of Nicholas of Verdun of 1181 (here), a stained-glass window in the church of St Thomas at Strasbourg of around a hundred years later.19 By Piero’s time, however, artists often only hint at the queen’s race and geographical origins, by introducing a maid from Africa into her train, as in the Arezzo fresco where such a figure plays a background role, literally placed in the middle distance to one side and behind the dominant group of gracious Quattrocento white patrician Tuscans, Sheba and her attendants (Pl. 8). The maid, signifying in this reticent manner the foreignness of Sheba’s origins, wears a beehive-shaped African cap of bound reeds or quills or maybe even ivory – Piero likes millinery to indicate origin and this hat is exactly the kind of exotic curio that Renaissance connoisseurs would collect to ornament their cabinets. The Master of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves also includes a graceful portrait of a black lady-in-waiting on the other side of the stream behind the queen (here).20 But sometimes the artists are not so evasive: a Bohemian manuscript illuminated before 1405 even attempts a reconciliation of history and Western ideals by later overpainting, giving the Queen blue-black face and hands – but she retains her flowing golden hair (Pl. 7).21
Consistently, however, by some sleight of hand, the biblical placing of Sheba’s kingdom in ‘the south’ is transformed into an elsewhere far away, marked by difference from mainstream Christendom.
One of the most popular Christian stories related the sufferings and the triumph of the relics of the cross on which Jesus died. Here, Heraclius, the seventh-century emperor of Byzantium, brings about a great victory over the pagan ruler of the Persians, Chosroes. When he refuses to convert, he is beheaded (far right); other symbols of the vanquished infidel, like the torn flag with a Moor’s head, convey the story’s message of conversion or exclusion. (Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross, Arezzo, 1452–66.)
The topographical position of the land of Sheba was – and is – hazy. Saba, in south-west Arabia, became fabulously wealthy, but only long after Solomon’s alleged reign; Seba, in the Bible, is identified with Cush, or Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Church have venerated the Queen of Sheba as their founding mother for centuries, finding of course nothing exotic in her blackness; the presentday religious movement of Rastafarians count her among their most important saints.22
Archaeologists are digging today in the Yemen in what are considered the remains of the queen’s realm, which stretched to include Sabaean settlements in the north of the Arabian peninsula. Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in the first century AD, interprets the queen’s origins as African, and locates her realm in Egypt and Ethiopia.23 This version overlaps with the Ethiopian Church’s view, though it places her territory further south and west.
The imaginary geography of Sheba can be mapped much more precisely than its historical position. From readings of the Bible itself, Sheba, or Saba, represents the far south, redolent of luxury and sensual pleasures. In the figure of the Queen of Sheba, the beckoning and voluptuous Orient becomes embodied; its imaginative territory in classical sources encompassed meridian and outlandish exoticism, sensuality, wonders, and luxuries. Herodotus’ fanciful reports of the warm south continued to resonate: ‘The most southerly country is Arabia,’ he wrote:
and Arabia is the only place that produces frankincense, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon, and the gum called ledanon [laudanum] … When they gather frankincense, they burn storax … to drive off the flying snakes … keep[ing] guard over all the trees which bear the frankincense … Still more surprising is the wa
y of getting ledanon … Sweet-smelling substance though it is, it is found in a most malodorous place; sticking, namely, like glue in the beards of he-goats … It is used as an ingredient in many kinds of perfume …24
In Arabia, fair rises from foul, rare perfumes from filthy billy-goats.
When the Queen of Sheba in the Bible brings from the south that great abundance of spices as well as gold as her gift to King Solomon, she stirs these associations, deeply rooted in antique myth of the Orient.25
The transmission of the queen’s story, in Western Christian iconography and folklore, thus places her sultry, heady southern domain in an easterly direction, marching with the original cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia, with the Garden of Eden. For the receivers of her story in the middle ages and Renaissance, this location of her possessions merges them with Islam’s; they converge with the later religion’s extensive dominions. Whether Arabian, or African, or from the hinterlands of presentday Iran and Iraq, she is identified with the Moors’ sphere of influence, and her biblical encounter with Solomon encrypts proleptically the promise of a Moor’s conversion to the future Christian faith, the return to the fold of a heathen potentate. On the same page of the Hortus deliciarum, the Abbess Herrad of Hohenburg’s inspired spiritual encyclopedia, compiled in the twelfth century, the Queen of Sheba is placed next to the scene of the apostle Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8: 27–39) – seldom represented in art before the encounter with the New World.26 The Queen of Sheba is a Muslim before time, and she becomes a Christian before time, just as Solomon is a precursor, one of the just who will be drawn from limbo at the Crucifixion; by the very fact of her difference, the Queen of Sheba plays a pivotal role in establishing conversion to orthodoxy.
In mathematics, in which Piero was an adept, the cross of course symbolizes addition: the sign of plus, of unity in sum. It appears in his paintings high in the sky above the throng in the battle of Chosroes and Heraclius, and once more, in the final lunette of the fresco cycle, above worshippers gathered from the four quarters to venerate the symbol of Christianity which has been restored to Jerusalem by the emperor Heraclius. Again they wear splendid hats to denote exoticism, and Piero conveys the new life they will enjoy now that they have entered the fold, by placing the raised cross-timber between the luxuriant foliage of two living green and silvery trees – are they olives, emblem of peace? – against a clear blue sky.
The formal plan of Piero’s narrative proclaims divine providence’s all-encompassing love, universal forgiveness, salvation; or, in other terms, its will to power, its catholic reach, its imperium. The whole sequence reduces and patterns time, in the same way as Piero’s pictorial storytelling telescopes space; but it also selects homologies across the centuries in order to provide a rhyming structure to the disparate episodes.
The epiphany brought about by Sheba in the ancient world returns in the vision of Queen Helena under the new dispensation; in Piero’s arrangement, the Queen of Sheba with her attendants kneeling by the bridge and Helena with her entourage praying reverently at the scene of the miracle wrought by the unearthed cross openly mirror each other on opposite walls of the chapel. The artist even used the same cartoon in reverse for the two compositions.27
Saint Helena, the mother of the first Christian emperor, acts as cornerstone in the Church Militant’s establishment on earth. The cross became Saint Helena’s identifying attribute. Artists, interpreting the story of the finding of the relics, saw visionary representatives of the ancient pagan world – the Hellespontine Sibyl and the Queen of Sheba who foresaw the fate of the wood of the cross – thus recapitulated in another saint, Helena. The Sibyl predated the redemption, but Helena came afterwards: she was herself one of the saved, the saint who was mother to the first converted ruler, who brought the whole Roman empire with him into the Church. In printed holy pictures of Helena, she even wears the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor (here).
Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, unearthed the relics of the cross in Jerusalem; personification of the Church militant, she wears the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and carries the cross of Faith. Defeated pagan satyrs look on aghast. Virgil Solis, the artist, worked in Nuremberg, where the Emperor was crowned at that time, c. 1553.
The symmetry of this scheme reflects the scholastic taste for recapitulation and préfiguration, binding the Old Testament to the New in a series of typological formulae, leading from Sibyl to queen to saint. In the Hortus deliciarum, the Queen of Sheba already stood for the Church of the Gentiles, consecrated by Solomon, a forerunner of Christ, and prophet in the sister Church of the (converted) Jews.28 It is a reward for her role in the scheme of salvation that she takes her place beside biblical patriarchs, kings and prophets in the portals of the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and abbeys of France, at Chartres, Reims, St Nicolas of Amiens (now destroyed), Corbeil (now in the Louvre) and in the stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral.
By the time that influential manual of theological instruction, the Speculum humanae salvationis, or Mirror of Human Salvation, was first composed, in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Queen of Sheba as the proleptic figure of Christian conversion was established. Though the programme of such texts or of Piero’s frescoes seems confusing and complex to today’s viewer, they speak the lingua franca of their time; when Henry VIII was establishing himself as Supreme Head of the Christian Church in England, he was drawn by Hans Holbein as Solomon receiving the submission of the Queen of Sheba: the allusion to Rome’s subordination was clear.29
The Queen of Sheba plays her part in this inaugural legend of Catholic Christianity when she acquiesces to Solomon’s superiority. In her proving of Solomon’s wisdom, Sheba stands for Gentile or pagan wisdom, while he embodies Jewish faith and learning: both will be enfolded in the bosom of the Church later. By so doing, she takes her place in medieval tradition, as a future Christian granted a vision of the cross’s destiny, like the Sibyls. The legend of the true cross is not the only place, however, where she can be found playing a pivotal part in the development of Christian mythology and stories.
Her condition as a heathen outside the fold, who receives enlightenment and abjures her native faith, is intertwined with her femaleness: she acts as the reciprocating Other who completes the male principle of wisdom, embodied by King Solomon; she symbolizes the carnal condition of woman in its fullest form – vitality, seductiveness, fertility and … wisdom, too. This added element, Sheba’s reputation for wisdom which matches Solomon’s, her status as his peer and natural partner, gives a different, mixed flavour to the heathenness, the heat, the meridian, the Moorishness of her persona. It makes her an insider as well as an outsider, anticipating such ambiguously positioned characters as the Arabian alemah, the figure of the wise dancing girl, who recited poetry and was adept at all civilized pleasures, and whose greatest forebear was Scheherazade, who told stories to save her life.30
The Queen of Sheba is saved within the story that enfolds her, and she develops into a source of wisdom for others. Her southernness – her outlandishness, in the literal sense that she comes from the periphery, far from the centre – also marks her character in Arabian folklore; and this quality of her difference, figured forth not by blackness but by other signs, relates in significant and fascinating ways to her later popular European manifestations, in fairy tale and nursery lore.
The erotic overtones of Solomon and Sheba’s meeting in the Bible inspired painters of dowry chests: Sheba appears here as both queen and bride. (Anon., late fifteenth century.)
The Queen of Sheba, watched by two gracefully dressed ladies-in-waiting, wades the stream rather than set foot on the bridge made of the future cross; in the margins the illustrator introduces a market woman spinning, as a sly comment, perhaps, on the character of the story. (The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht, c. 1440.)
CHAPTER 8
The Glass Paving and the Secret Foot: The Queen of Sheba II
Tell
me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.
John Donne1
IN FOLK TALES of the Middle East, Solomon hears, from his messenger the hoopoe, that a fabulously rich queen, called Bilqis, has come to the throne in the south. He becomes curious. She worships the sun, he is told, not Allah: she stands in relation to this Muslim Solomon as a pagan, just as she does to the Jewish proto-Christian king; and, just as Sheba in the Old Testament realizes the truth of King Solomon’s God, so she does in the Koran.2 In a late version of the story, Solomon is so delighted with the hoopoe’s report that he rewards his messenger with a feathered crest for her head and a gilded beetle for her lunch.3
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were celebrated in Islamic doctrine and scripture. The wise king is as vital a persona in the Muslims’ holy book as he is in the Bible, and more of a wizard. Attended by djinns and magic animals, he can work wonders and enchantments greater than any other king, so, when he orders the queen to come to him ‘submissively’, and she is reluctant, he uses his prodigious powers of goety, or (black) magic, and performs various tricks to bring her to him. They include conjuring a stream across the floor of his courtyard that looks like water but is really made of mirror (Pl. 6). When the queen arrives, the Koran continues:
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