The Green Man
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* * *
title : The Green Man
author : Basford, Kathleen.
publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
isbn10 | asin : 0859914976
print isbn13 : 9780859914970
ebook isbn13 : 9780585182209
language : English
subject Foliate head (Sculpture) , Sculpture, Medieval--Themes, motives, Christian art and symbolism,--Medieval, 500-1500.
publication date : 1998
lcc : NB1912.F64B37 1998eb
ddc : 734
subject : Foliate head (Sculpture) , Sculpture, Medieval--Themes, motives, Christian art and symbolism,--Medieval, 500-1500.
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The Green Man
Kathleen Basford
D. S. BREWER
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© Kathleen Basford 1978
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 1978
Reprinted 1996
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
Reprinted in paperback 1998
ISBN 0 85991 024 5 hardback
ISBN 0 85991 497 6 paperback
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604-4126, USA
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-50143
Printed in Great Britain by Whitstable Litho Printers Ltd, Whitstable, Kent
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Contents
Personal Preface
7
The History and Developments of the Green Man
9
(i) Prototypes of The Green Man in antique and early medieval ornament
9
(ii) The era of The Green Man
14
List of References
23
Plates
25
List of Plates
121
Index of Places
127
Acknowledgements
128
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TOKUMI AYZEN,
Who loves the Green Man
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Personal Preface
The medieval churches and cathedrals of Western Europe are full of fantastic images. This is the story of one of them the foliate head, a face or mask with leaves sprouting from it which we, in Britain, nowadays call the Green Man. 1,2,3,4
The Green Man is probably the most common decorative motif of medieval sculpture that has been left to us. It can be found on roof bosses, capitals, corbels, fonts, tombs, tympana, screens, bench ends, poppy heads, misericords and arm rests. It was a remarkably adaptable motif: it could be manipulated to fit any space or position where ornament was required. It could be introduced to enrich, enliven and bring variety into a scheme of leaf decoration and there provide, like a fantastic flower, a focal point of interest, or it could be made to blend into its leafy surroundings so inconspicuously that only the most perceptive eye could distinguish it from pure foliage. It would be used to form a centre for a discrete leaf cluster or a source from which long sprays of foliage might flow out as water from the head of a fountain. The idea of a face in the leaves could excite an imaginative response, and the individual craftsman could improvise on the theme and create his own fanciful variation of the motif.
Many of these carvings are sinister. Some of them are powerful fantasies of the eerie and macabre. There are very few benevolent or serenely smiling faces: more typically they frown. The eyes glare balefully or stare, unfocused, into space, full of dark foreboding. Sometimes the eyes are squinting, the expressions suggesting various levels of inebriation; bellicose, morose, even comatose, but seldom jocose. Sometimes, the faces are partially or almost wholly hidden behind the leaves they bear, secret faces, peering through gaps in the foliage.
It was the discovery of such faces under the leaves, carved on roof bosses in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral that first suggested a resemblance to the Green Man, or Jack in the Green, peeping through the leaves with which he was covered when he played his part in the ceremonies on May Day.5
Although the Jack in the Green explanation cannot be stretched to fit and cover every example of the motif as it was used in the Middle Ages (it may not even precisely fit any of them), the image does, in fact, display at least one Green Man characteristic, namely, his power of revival and regeneration.
Images may pick up many different ideas during the course of time. They can evolve and diversify as they are exposed to different cultural climates and as they catch the imagination of the particular individuals who use them. Visual images, no less than written documents, can give valuable insights into the thoughts, ideas and even dreams of people who made them.6
The foliate head attracted many different ideas into its sphere during its long history and each example can be studied as a historical document, reflecting some of the thoughts that shaped it at a particular place and at a particular time, and also as a personal document, left to us by an individual craftsman who, though he may have sometimes been an illiterate man, unable to put his thoughts and feelings into writing, could express the strangest and most subtle ideas in his carving.
My personal quest for the Green Man began with a chance and quite unexpected encounter with the foliate head at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. One day, while wandering round the ruins,
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I happened to glance up at one of the tall windows of the Chapel of the Nine Altars and notice, near the apex of the arch, the carving of a human head with a weird growth of vegetation coming out of the mouth. It caught my attention because there is so little else in the way of imagery or decorative sculpture at Fountains. Even during the later period of its history this Abbey maintained its austere Cistercian character and so this solitary Green Man, the only ornament of any kind on the outside wall of the Chapel, took me by surprise.
The stone on which the figure is carved was inserted late in the fifteenth century to repair the damage due to settlement. 7 Although the introduction of a foliate head may have been an innovation and something of an anomaly at Fountains it was a long-established motif in church architecture and its use here at this time would probably not have seemed remarkable, much less revolutionary. The choice of this rather than any other common motif may well have been determined by the fact that it was the one which could most easily be shaped to fit the situation and cover an awkward join, but the mason made something very personal and moving of his ornamental patchwork.
The sad face of this withered old man seemed to me the most human touch left in the ruins and yet, at the same time, the most ghostly. It reminded me of the Echo image in Webster's Duchess of Malfi. The echo, "the best echo that you ever heard", was the only remaining "life" in the ruins of the old abbey which Antonio, the hero, visited just before his death, with his friend Delio, and to every sentence spoken it gave a deadly accent.
Antonio ... all things have their end: Churches and Cities (which have diseases like to men) Must have like death that we have.
Echo Like death that we have.
Delio Now the Echo hath caught you.
Antonio It groan'd (me thought) and gave A very deadly accent?
Echo Deadly accent.
Delio I told you 'twas a pretty one. You
may make it A huntsman, or a falconer, or a musician Or a thing of sorrow.
Echo A thing of sorrow.
Antonio Aye sure, that suits it best.
The Green Man, caught up in the branches like the severed head of a felon, makes a very deadly accent on the walls of Fountains. It certainly could not be interpreted as a Jack in the Green. Not only would a Jack in the Green make nonsense in this strictly monastic church but the derelict head, invaded and taken over by vegetation, is an image of death and ruin rather than that of life and resurrection. It is, indeed, "a thing of sorrow". That suits it best.
I began to wonder if the craftsman could make what he liked of the motif, "a huntsman, a falconer, or a musician" or whatever it was that the idea of a face in the leaves suggested to him. Why should it have suggested an image of human ruin?
But I had picked up the Green Man story at a point when the motif was near the end of its life in the Church and in order to understand this one isolated fragment I had to go back and try to follow the story from the beginning.
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Drawing of carving on the base of the lid of St Abre's tomb, Poitiers; 4th or 5th century.
The History and Development of the Green Man
(i) Prototypes of the Green Man in Antique and Early Medieval Ornament
The foliate head, or leaf mask, from which the Green Man ultimately derives, appeared in Roman art during the second half of the first century AD., 8,9 but it is generally considered rather as a second century motif since this was the period of its formal development. It was sometimes used as a repeated motif in the "peopled scroll" ornament, and sometimes as an isolated motif. Male masks with acanthus scrolls sprouting from their faces were reproduced on friezes on both triumphal arches of Septimius Severus in Rome and on Aurelian's Temple of the Sun, also in Rome,10 but the motif was widespread throughout the eastern and western parts of the Empire, and examples are found as far apart as Baalbek11,12 and Bordeaux.13 It was used on temples serving many different deities and also on sarcophagi, in much the same way as the medusa mask.
The motif has, in fact, been described as a male medusa,14 and one example, carved in high relief on the facade of a temple at Hatra in Mesopotamia15 (the modem Al Hadr, Iraq) has snakes writhing in his hair. The Hatra mask bears a remarkable resemblance to the glowering male medusa on the pediment of the temple at Sulis Minerva at Bath,16 though this is not a leaf mask. The Bath medusa has also been compared with the scowling Okeanos mask on the central medallion of the great silver dish from Mildenhall (now in the British Museum).17 Like the Hatra mask, the Mildenhall Okeanos has a beard of seaweed or acanthus, but has dolphins instead of snakes swimming through his wild, wavy locks. The penetrating glare, common to all three masks, is a persistent though not invariable characteristic of the antique leaf masks and must be recognised as a "family trait", later inherited by the Green Men.
Other, quite different prototypes of the Green Man are found on several fragments from the richly sculptured funerary monuments discovered at Neumagen, on the Mosel, not far from Trier.18
The monuments, which date from the second and third centuries, were made to commemorate distinguished and wealthy Treveran citizens, many of whom were wine merchants, and some of
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the splendid sarcophagi are actually in the form of wine ships, manned by a crew of sailors some of them very merry.
The leaf masks, which appear on fragments from four of these memorials have been cited as being among the most important for the development of motif in countries north of the Alps. 19 One of them almost certainly represents Okeanos who, in this context, would symbolise a safe and prosperous voyage to the Islands of the Blessed. The meaning of the others is not so clear. The leaf mask which is the central feature of a large sculptured panel from the Iphigenienpfeiler has, on one side of it, a cymbal with a shepherd's crook stuck through it,20 and these objects may have Bacchic significance since the maenads clashed cymbals and satyrs carried crooked sticks.21 It is tempting to wonder if the leaf mask also refers to some aspect of the Bacchic cult, and perhaps recalls the ancient rustic festivals held in honour of Dionysos revellers stained their faces with new wine and masked them with huge beams made out of leaves.22 On the other hand, Okeanos is often used side by side with Bacchic themes, so this leaf mask might well represent Okeanos.
The Neumagen leaf masks are very variable in form and range from the type in which the leafy element is subordinate to the human element reduced to a mere frill of acanthus beard and whisker on the fleshy chin and cheeks, and a curly acanthus eyebrow, to the type where the human face is completely veiled by acanthus (as on the Iphigenienpfeiler) with the leaves not only substituting for the facial hair but also growing from the tear glands in the corners of the eyes and from the inside of the mouth, and, finally, to the type which is all leaves the human element suggested by the folding and overlapping of the deeply lobed acanthus.
Two faces representative of this extreme type are discovered in a frieze from the Schulreliefpfeiler. The frieze is filled with sensitively carved acanthus and the faces are formed, it would seem, as though by a chance arrangement of the leaves. Yet they are so skillfully portrayed that although nothing remains of human flesh they are full of human feeling. How can a duster of leaves seem so grief-stricken? Perhaps because, in this complete metamorphosis, it is suggested that the sad faces are no more than a memory.
The fragments of the Neumagen monuments are now in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Trier, and here also are two casts taken from the splendid second century leaf masks which were introduced into Trier Cathedral in the sixth century.
*The casts are the only visible evidence we have today of these leaf masks since the originals are walled up in the Cathedral behind masonry erected during the course of restoration in the eleventh century. They were discovered about a hundred years ago when excavations were carried out at the time of a further restoration.23 The temporary removal of part of the eleventh century masonry gave access to one of the four pillars set up in the Square Chancel by Bishop Nicetius in the sixth century. The lavishly carved composite capital had, for its principal ornament, a huge leaf mask on each face, between the volutes. The cast, taken at the time of this brief exposure, shows a leaf-crowned head, with more leaves spreading over the brow and growing on the cheeks, from under the eyes and from the sides of the nose. The upper lip has been broken and because of this damage the expression of the face is somewhat distorted, but the great eyes, rolling up under the leafy brows, show that it was a deeply serious expression.
At the time of the nineteenth century excavations it was believed that the capitals were contemporary with the sixth century pillars and had been carved by Italian craftsmen working from Byzantine models. This dating was generally accepted until 196224 and although the capitals had
* Since I worked at Trier a small window has been inserted into the wall, so that visitors can now glimpse the Green Man. I am grateful to William Anderson for this information.
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been tentatively attributed to the second century by one earlier authority 25 this date was not finally confirmed until the excavations of 1961-6326 when the original material was re-examined and subjected to a more critical scrutiny. The capitals were studied with particular reference to archaeological findings made on the site of Hadrianic temple, known as "Am Herrenbrünnchen".27 Their style and material corresponded to the style and material of other sculptured fragments discovered on that site, and their measurements showed that they would have exactly fitted the pillars of the portico of the temple. It was therefore concluded that they had originally belonged to it and that Bishop Nicetius had recovered them from the rains and used them, at second hand, for his new pillars in the Cathedral. Once installed in their new position, the capitals were painted in bright colours, the leaf masks and volutes golden yellow and the acanthus ornament below them red. Traces of pigment could still be seen on the capital when the second cast was made at the time of
the 1861-63 excavations.