From the Beast to the Blonde
Page 15
She was bidden to enter the palace; but when she saw it she thought it was a pool of water, and bared her legs. But Solomon said, ‘It is a palace paved with glass.’
‘Lord,’ she said, ‘I have sinned against my own soul. Now I submit with Solomon to Allah, Lord of the creation.’4
This highly compressed encounter is indecipherable without additional information, without knowledge of the accompanying lore which attributed a peculiarity to the Queen of Sheba, a deformity located under her dress. Legends which predate the writing of the Koran spread the rumour that she had ass’s hooves. In more genial variations, she simply suffers from hairy legs.5 Some of the stories tell how the stream cures her affliction – it miraculously turns to healing water. In other versions, doubtless popular in the bazaar, in which her problem is hairiness, Solomon comes to her rescue and, with the assistance of his djinns, invents a depilatory cream. The recipe is given in some texts: a drastic solution of lime and arsenic.6
But in the Koran, her unwitting exposure of her legs brings about her recognition of the true god. Her false faith, her earlier worship of the sun, is somehow bodied forth in the cryptic allusion to her legs, revealed by Solomon’s enchantments and then magicked away.
The story travelled. Brought back to Western Europe by crusaders and pilgrims, it was conflated with other stories in circulation; by the twelfth century, the queen’s suspect nether parts had merged with the fancies of colder climates, about witches’ and demonesses’ and sorceresses’ feet, and fantasies flourished which embroidered on her Koranic deformity: she was rumoured to be splay-, web- or bird-footed, or to have reptilian, dragon- or griffin-like limbs concealed under her clothes. The water which cured her deformity becomes transferred to her limbs, bequeathing to her marine extremities, suitable for wading.
The most packed, eloquent and powerful interpretation of the legend in Western Europe occurs in the upper portion of the fantastically patterned mosaic floor of the Cathedral of Otranto, in Puglia, itself the heel of Italy’s boot. It is also the earliest of the surviving visual examples, as it was created in 1165 by the monk Pantaleone who signed and dated his remarkable work. He includes King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in separate roundels side by side at the summit of one of the three great branching trees of life – trees of story – which cover the entire floor like a sumptuous prayer carpet. The queen, who is labelled ‘Regina Austri’ (Queen of the South), is richly arrayed and bejewelled in an oriental diapered and belted tunic and diadem (Pl. 9); she is seated on an ornamental stool and holds up one shoe in her right hand; it is studded with the same bright blue stones as the earring she wears. Her left foot is bare, and though the mosaic admittedly has been damaged over the intervening centuries, the foot is wedge-shaped like the ace of spades, and shows no divisions for the toes. (The feet of other figures, like Adam and Eve, in the same mosaic, possess carefully delineated digits.) In the margins of the roundels, where Pantaleone placed glosses and comments with the sly humour of the scriptorium (a donkey harpist, a fox cymbalist), there also appears, facing the queen, across Solomon, a tall, leggy, standing bird somewhat like a crane, a stork or an ostrich.7
The two roundels are arranged next to two more which enhance their significance by analogy, in the manner of typological pendants. On the left, corresponding to the Queen of Sheba, a double-tailed mermaid, who wears similar earrings to Sheba’s, presents herself face forward, split at the crotch in the style of a Celtic sheila-na-gig, holding up her two tails in each hand (Pl. 10); beside her, in the margins, an octopus undulates its several limbs in witty imitation. The complementary female symbolisms lightly deployed by the artist monk around the figure of the prophetic queen – bird/heathen, siren/octopus – are rooted in biblical and classical mythical metonymy. The mosaic floor of Otranto, with its images of the splay-footed queen, the snaky and tentacular undulations of the polyp, and the exhibitionist siren, anticipates Freud’s identification of snaky-haired Medusa with the female genitals; Freud also analysed the symbolism of feet in sexual practice and imagery with relevant perceptiveness:
The foot owes its preference as a fetish – or a part of it – to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet – as has long been suspected – are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member.8
The euphemistic as well as fetishistic substitution occurs very early: the seraphim of Isaiah have six wings, two to cover their faces, two to cover their feet and two for flying (Isa. 6: 2). But, as the Jerusalem Bible points out, ‘feet’ here stand for sexual organs.9 In the case of the angels, this raises all kinds of fundamental questions, of course.
But the monk Pantaleone at Otranto was also drawing directly on the Bible when he gave Sheba the tall, ostrich-like bird and the mermaid for companions. The scholars rendering the Bible into Greek from Hebrew, into Latin from Greek, stumbled when they came across the wondrous jumble of hybrid creatures of pagan and classical fantasy, as they tried to match them across cultures: the Greek Bible rendered as seirenes the Hebrew thannim, and Saint Jerome, who usually translated thannim as dracones (dragons), chose instead the word struthio (ostrich) to paint the desolation of Babylon after its overthrow:
But beasts of the desert will lie there,
and owls fill its houses.
Ostriches will make their home there
and satyrs have their dances there.
Hyenas will call to each other in its keeps,
jackals in the luxury of its palaces …
(Isa. 13: 21–2)
To a picture of wilderness reclaiming a city, the jackals and owls and beasts lend some authority. But satyrs and ostriches make an odd pairing in any sort of natural history, whereas sirens, as companions to satyrs, would figure, representing emblematically the horrible sweets of pagan hedonism (Babylon, indeed). The King James Bible skips altogether the problem of species at this passage – its Babylonian wasteland is simply peopled by ‘doleful creatures’. But the earlier choice of the bird species ostrich for creatures making siren-like noises gives the oddest results: even in the magnificent text of the modern Jerusalem Bible, it is ‘the wailing’ of the ostrich that is sometimes heard (Mie. 1:8). The adult male ostrich booms at a low pitch at night, and the young warble: neither a siren song nor a lament.10 Nor does the bird belong in the folklore of seduction (unless one counts ostrich-feather boas) or in the rituals of death. But ostriches, unlike most birds, have cloven feet, which lent them to biblical symbolism.11 Sirens, on the other hand, do call, even wail, while their fins and their tails or tail (legs anomalously joined) correspond to other amphibious creatures’ webbed toes.
The ostrich of the Bible was once a siren; and these residual pagan enchantresses had been called ‘sirens’ in the translations of the Bible before Jerome’s Vulgate, as Jerome knew. But when he justified his rendering, he was revealing: ‘“Thunnim” are called sirens, but we will interpret them as demons or certain monsters or certainly great dragons, which are crested and fly.’12 (Ostriches do not fit this description either.) Later, in the same commentary on Isaiah, he argued: ‘beasts and dragons and ostriches and hairy and howling creatures and sirens [which] we understand are bestial forms of angels or demons …’ When he gives a list of the names of devils, he includes, last but not least, the Hebrew word which he himself had rendered as ‘ostrich’ rather than ‘siren’.13 Perhaps he felt the word ‘siren’ was itself too seductive, too freighted with the classical ambiguities, not clear-cut enough as a term of disparagement. Something more unambiguously repugnant was needed. The sirens’ ‘lamentabilis vox’ (lamentable voice) and ‘venenata ora’ (poisoned lips), he knew led their hearers astray – and he defined the danger in a particularly revealing way. ‘The foods of these demons are the songs of poets,’ he warned in one letter.14 In another, he condemned music and singing at banquets, comparing the guests to sailors who throw themselves on
the rocks at the sound of the sirens, because amid such carousing, ‘it is difficult to keep one’s modesty’.15
The immodest, tempting, singing siren of the seas survived patristic disapproval – and one of her refuges was fairy tale, in which she appears as a character (see Chapter Twenty-three) and as a concealed force, the underlying voice of the narrative.
Sirens and mermaids, with biblical warranty, entered the bestiary of heterogeneous monsters on medieval capitals, ivory caskets, misericords, and mosaic floors, as one variation among so many of the demonic temptations in circulation. These are hiding places which themselves convey the sirens’ lingering, latent seduction, corners where they could still be seen and heard – but askance. The mosaic floor at Otranto is only one of the works of art that celebrate the banned voice of the siren – assimilating her in the process to the splay-footed queen who tested the wisdom of Solomon with her questions.
II
In one recension of the medieval legend of the cross, made in the twelfth century, the manuscript specifies that the Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian and had webbed feet.16 But this may well represent a suggestive scribal error by a German monk, who wrote ‘pes anserinus’ (goose-footed) instead of ‘pes asininus’ (assfooted) because he was confusing the Arabic legend with the rich homegrown tradition of amphibian swan-maidens, goblins, and elves who had skin joining their toes. The queen’s outsider status would also have invited this change to the more particularly hybrid, telltale outward sign.
Like many curious slips of the pen – or the tongue – the image caught the recipients’ fancy and was much repeated: on the portal of Saint-Bénigne, in Dijon, the Queen of Sheba was carved with one webbed foot appearing beneath the hem of her dress, standing beside King Solomon in an elegant, tapered, twelfth-century sculpture. Saint-Bénigne was defaced in the Revolution, but a drawing from 1739 survives.17
Feet are ascribed telltale marks of identity and origin, perhaps through the literal-minded wordplay of the imagination, since they are the lowest part of the body and in touch with the earth as opposed to the heavens. When Sheba refuses to set foot on the bridge made of the wood of the cross, she admits that her tread would defile it – quite apart from any stigmatizing malformation of her foot itself. In the medieval legend, she steps into the water of the stream instead, and is miraculously cured, like her Koranic counterpart Bilqis. A German poem, composed between 1347 and 1378 and existing in many different redactions and manuscripts, shows how the skeins of the two stories were twisted together in northern Europe. In this text, the fantasy about the Queen of Sheba’s deformed foot reappears; and in the same poem, she is called Sibilla, as if Sibyl were her name, appropriate to her function, for the poem belongs to the corpus of German apocalyptic literature spoken by the Sibyls. Thus, a triple connection is developed to form a narrative composed of the biblical Queen of Sheba, the Muslim legend of her peculiarity, and the Western milleniarist tradition about the Sibyls, among whom she can be included. And this triple persona is caùght in the web of stories about the true cross:
At this time when this report rang out
everywhere, reaching every land,
there lived a woman, a prophetess,
and she was indeed wise in understanding.
She was called Sibilla,
and God had granted her
that she could see in the stars
what was to happen in the world
for many thousands of years …
The lady was beautiful and noble
and had a foot that looked
as if it were a goose’s foot.
She was deeply ashamed of it,
yet with it she walked and stood
as other people do on their feet.
Sibilla …
wanted to find out the truth,
so she came to King Solomon.
That wise man caught sight of her
– he’d heard reports about her too –
and received her with great eagerness.
He said, ‘Welcome, exalted guest!’
She thanked him duly and firmly.
He said, ‘My lady, Why are you here?
I have never been so glad to see
any guest as to see you.’
‘I shall tell you,’ she said:
‘I have been told so much about your building
and your wisdom and the grace of your court
and so many other things besides,
that I want to see the truth of it.’
The King said: ‘I do not want to miss
your eating with me.’ ‘Gladly,’ she said.
As she wanted to go to eat in the court,
it happened that she had to pass over
the gangway made of Adam’s tree.
She remained there, standing silently,
till she had fully perceived the wood,
then waded through the water and the brook,
to honour and pay homage to the wood
that was laid across the water.
And because of that honour, through God’s power
the goosefoot was formed
into a human foot, like the other –
Sibilla was filled with joy.18
In this poem, Sibilla then makes certain characteristic apocalyptic prophecies – five in all – about the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Day of Judgement and the coming of the Antichrist.
The picturesqueness and piquancy of this tale of metamorphosis captivated many interpreters in Western Europe.19 Although there were two translations of the Koran made in the twelfth century, and the humanist Nicholas of Cusa was studying it at the beginning of the fifteenth, the Koran would not have provided the dominant source of the tale for the versions that circulated this motif of Islamic and Christian legend for over five hundred years.
An anonymous fresco painter in Bohemia, around 1450 – that is a little earlier than Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo – depicted the story on a chapel wall at Kutna Hora monastery church, near Prague, showing the queen with a griffon’s left foot, fording the stream rather than treading on the wood of the cross (above left). More frequently, the story surfaces in rather more ephemeral ‘low’ materials, in woodcuts and songs, like a print from Ulm of around 1492; it was clearly still persisting in this area of Germany a hundred and fifty years after the poem quoted above. The print shows the Queen of Sheba with a single, sizeable goose-foot peeping out from the hem of her dress, while she engages Solomon in deep debate (above right). The woodcut was printed on the title page of a collection of the Sibyl’s sayings, as well as on a broadsheet with verses stressing God’s mercy to those who repent and the pains of hellfire for those who do not.20
The story of the Queen of Sheba’s suspect foot travelled from the east: it reached Bohemia, and was painted in the monastery of Kutna Hora LEFT around 1450, and was disseminated in prints, too, as in the woodcut of Solomon and Sheba RIGHT from Ulm, around 1492.
Ulm, a prosperous and aspiring humanist city, was a crossroads for pilgrims between the West and the Holy Land and their different folklore; it was for instance the home of Felix Faber, the monk who recorded most compendiously of all medieval pilgrims his two journeys to see the holy places and who also retold the story of Sheba’s recognizing the bridge.21 Several printshops sprang up in the city in the monk’s lifetime, immediately after the development of printing, and published such literature as Aesop and Boccaccio in German translation. The city prided itself on its progressive humanism: Heinrich Steinhowel, the translator of these profane authors, was nevertheless rewarded, it is thought, by a portrait in the cathedral itself. Among the busts in the choir stalls which Jörg Syrlin carved from 1468 to 1470, he appears as the comic playwright Terence.22
Terence is one of the busts portraying classical philosophers, from Pythagoras to Cicero, who form poppyhead finials on the stalls, while kings, prophets and other biblical heroes in bas-relief fill the ogive panels on the wall behind. This male pantheon balances the throng, on
the opposite side of the choir, of their female counterparts: Sibyls for the finials, saints and heroines on the wall. Ninety-nine figures in all, and among them, some of the finest naturalistic fifteenth-century portraiture in the medium of wood carving: with the Tiburtine Sibyl, for instance, Jörg Syrlin achieves a remarkably lively study of female old age in his time, altogether free from the morbid brooding on decay and vanity and sin in the work of contemporaries like the Nuremberg sculptor Viet Stoss. The Phrygian Sibyl too is rendered with delicate psychological sympathy.
Jörg Syrlin strategically placed the Queen of Sheba in the gap between the righthand choir stalls, against the wall over the door, overlooking the space where the Hellespontine Sibyl faces the Tiburtine – physically acting as a hyphen between the two antique seers, and holding the beam of the cross in her hand.23 This is a rare iconographie example of the pagan queen, inserted among her visionary colleagues in a schema of high cultural character, a surviving monumental expression of the parallels elaborated in commentaries on the Bible. Although Syrlin’s meanings cannot be fully recovered, it is probable, given the publication of Sheba’s Sybilline sayings in the city, that his contemporary audience would have grasped the reason for the queen’s position in relation to the prophetesses.
The Hellespontine Sibyl, whose prophecies focussed on the cross, displays a feathered buskin, as if to convey another pagan outsider’s solidarity with Sheba. (Jean Guiramand, Cathedral of Saint-Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence, first quarter of sixteenth century.)
A full book of sixty-four woodcuts called Boec van der Houte (The Book of the Rood), printed in the Netherlands by John Veldener in 1483, tells in Dutch rhyming couplets a different variation of the story of the wood of the cross, which follows the scheme found in Thomas Malory rather than The Golden Legend.24, 25 It also includes a little-known episode: the torture of the Sibyl after she foretells the end of the kingdom of the Jews.26 This Sibyl has assimilated the character of the Hellespontine in particular, for she repeats her traditional prophecy almost verbatim: ‘Dat Christus soulde hanghen in dat houte claer’. (This Sibyl’s traditional message is ‘Felix ille qui ligno pendet ab alto’ – the translator has chosen ‘high’ in the sense of exalted, ‘claer’.) Tied naked to the stake, the Sibyl places her best – webbed – foot forward. In the next woodcut the heroine refuses to set foot on the bridge and wades across instead. The poem then focusses on Helena, who, as in all the legends of the cross, finds the relics and brings about the conversion of Rome. The glissade in this volume from Sibyl to Queen of Sheba crucially strengthens the argument here, because within the specific narrative of the cross, the anomalous foot and the stream, it merges the wizened-crone type of Sibyl with the beautiful queen, and elides the difference in their positions in the social hierarchy.