The Green Man
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It must be assumed that Bishop Nicetius had admired the excellent workmanship and sumptuous splendour of these figured capitals and had chosen them for these qualities and not for their particular subject matter. The foliate head came into the Cathedral, as it were, by accident. But it was no doubt an event of great importance for the motif and probably marked a turning point in its history.
The beautiful leaf mask capitals were displayed for five hundred years in Trier Cathedral. The casts can give us only a grey and rather ghostly reflection of their magnificence. The pillars on which they were mounted stood, one at each comer of the Square Chancel, an area of special sanctity which was built in the fourth century and planned round a curious architectural feature28 which is thought to have been repository for some precious relic, perhaps a fragment of the True Cross or perhaps the Seamless Robe which is now preserved in the Cathedral Treasury.
In Trier, the leaf mask began its new life in the service of the church in particularly auspicious and favourable circumstances. Sanctioned by long use in this venerable church in one of the earliest and most important strongholds of Christianity in the West it could pass easily into medieval ornament.
While we may suppose that it was probably this chance induction into the Cathedral in Trier that gave the foliate head a secure place in the church, we cannot be sure that, but for this happy accident, it would not have survived. Even before Bishop Nicetius had adopted it, the motif had found a small niche in Christian ornament.
A foliate head is carved in shallow relief on the base of the marble lid of the tomb of Sainte-Abre in the Church of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers.29,30 This Christian tomb, which dates from the fourth or fifth century, is decorated with motifs borrowed from pagan tombs. They include dolphins, a rayed bust, and a vase containing foliage as well as the foliate head. It is a curious carving, quite unlike the Hellenistic leaf masks. The head is surrounded by contiguous and overlapping leaves which may represent the hair and beard, while large sprays of stylised foliage and flowers spring from the nostrils and extend on either side of the head, like fantastic moustaches. This modest work is of great interest, not only because it is such an early example in Christian ornament, but because of its originality. It does not so much look backward to the Hellenistic leaf masks from which it undoubtedly derives as forward, perhaps providing a prototype for the early medieval figures with leaves, or leafy tendrils or branches coming out of the nostrils.
There are no foliate heads, nor other fantastic creatures in the eastern church. This is possibly explained by the fact that from the eighth century there was strong opposition to the use of imagery. The absence of the motif certainly cannot be explained by any lack of inspiring models. There is much evidence to show that the leaf mask was a popular architectural ornament in Constantinople and in other places round the Bosphoros and the Sea of Marmora in the fifth
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and sixth centuries. Beautiful examples in the Hellenistic tradition were still being produced in this region at the very time that the motif was beginning its new lease of life in the western church. Several figured capitals, all of them dating from the sixth century, with leaf masks as their only, or dominant motif can be seen today in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. The finest example in this collection was discovered at Mudanya on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmora in 1885. The leaf masks are situated at the angles on one side of the capital and between them is a horn of plenty which has an acanthus leaf at the base and grapes brimming over the lip and, suspended above, a leaf from the plane tree with a ripe pod on the left of it and an ear of wheat on the right. The masks have been described as figures of Okeanos under a type which is, at once, satyr and sea god. 31 The hair, eyebrows, whiskers, moustache and beard are all formed from acanthus. The faces have both strength and delicacy and an expression of sombre gravity. The forehead is slightly furrowed and the eyes, with their deeply incised pupils, stare out into space and seem preoccupied with inner vision.
A second capital, of unknown provenance, has leaf masks of the satyr type, one on each of its four faces. Two large acanthus leaves, growing from either side of a narrow vertical fold of flesh just above the nose, rise up to form the moustache, while a fifth leaf, growing from under the full lip, hangs down over the chin to form the beard. The face is dearly indicated as a mask, cut off in a straight line across the forehead, and yet this mask-like appearance is contradicted by the intensity of the expression: the curiously elongated eyes, with their barely focused pupils, have a look of rapt introspection.
Two leaf masks, one on each of a pair of capitals found in Istanbul on the site now occupied by the New Palace of Justice, are represented with the pupils of the eyes converging in a quite definite squint.
The horn of plenty appears again side by side with leaf masks on a capital discovered in the old City Wall in 1972. This second example may indicate that the juxtaposition of the two motifs was more than mere coincidence.
Very few of the foliated figures in the manuscripts and carvings of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries bear any close resemblance to the leaf masks of antiquity; throughout this period the leaf mask is mainly represented as a demon. The change of character is dearly illustrated in two manuscripts produced either at Reichenau or Trier about the year 980.32 The first of these33 was presented to Egbert, Archbishop of Trier in 983. The dedicatory miniature is framed by a border of human masks linked together by an acanthus scroll. The idea is obviously derived from the leaf masks in the Hellenistic ''peopled scroll" motif, but the faces are rather goblin-like and the foliage sprouts from the mouth and not from the cheeks. In the border of the corresponding dedication page of the second manuscript,34 presented to Egbert two years later, the human masks are replaced by horrific hollow demon masks with snakes and birds coming our of their ears. The scroll is a complex of foliage, birds and beasts, one form growing out of another even the leaves have become demonic.
The thoughts that lie behind this change can probably be traced to Rabanus Maurus, an erudite and influential theologian of the eighth century. According to him, the leaves represented the sins of the flesh or lustful and wicked men doomed to eternal damnation.35
The evil aspect of the leaf mask is nowhere more dramatically expressed than in the carving on the façade of San Pietro, Toscanella (Tuscania), Viterbo. It is, basically, a type of "peopled-scroll" ornament, framing an open, colonnaded window. The leafy scrolls issue from two monstrous masks centrally placed in the upper and lower borders of the frame. Both masks are in the form of a tricephalos, a head with three faces, one presented in frontal view, the other two in profile. Each face has its own mouth and nose, but shares with the others a single pair of eyes.
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In medieval imagery the tricephalos could symbolise either the Holy Trinity or Absolute Evil. 36,37 The two directly opposite iconological applications do not, of course, derive from one another, but each derives independently from a Gallo-Roman prototype (extremely common in the region of Reims). There can be no doubt which of these meanings is intended at Toscanella.
The two monsters are similar but not identical. In both cases the centre face sticks his tongue out while the faces in profile stick out, not a fleshy tongue, but a long "tongue" of foliated scroll. Each demon has, however, his own diabolical attributes: the upper one is horned and the lower one, which is attached to a torso, clasps a serpent to his bosom and the snake, like his master, sticks out his venomous tongue.
The imagery probably refers to the story of Christ's Descent into Hell as it was told in the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus. This story, quoted in a Good Friday sermon preached by Eusebius of Alexandria in the sixth century, tells how the devil, thrown into confusion by the Crucifixion, fled in panic to hell to shut the gates to prevent Christ's entry into the infernal regions, but he, with his angels, followed in pursuit and demanded admittance: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in"
Ps. 24.7. Christ confronted Satan at the threshold and addressed him as (translated as triceps Beelzebub in a fifteenth century manuscript) Three headed Beelzebub.38,39 In the same apocryphal gospel Satan is called radix omnium malorum, Root of All Evil.40 The coiling tendrils that push out through the mouths of the threefaced demons may well be explained as suckers springing up from the evil root below.
The demons of early medieval art are frequently portrayed with the tongue, the "unruly member", sticking out. A demon head on a capital at Avignon not only sticks his tongue out but also displays savage teeth. The demon mouth may sometimes signify the Jaws of Hell, and on a capital in the cathedral at Autun the body of a man is seen disappearing in the jaws of a leaf mask.
Twelfth century leaf masks are seldom represented with the foliage actually growing on the face. A mask of this type, carved on a corbel at Königslutter and dating from 1135, is one of the rare exceptions. Far more common are the types with foliage foliated scrolls, slender tendrils or thicker branches coming out of the mouth and nose. It seems possible that these forms developed as extreme modifications of the foliate moustache (the leaf mask on the tomb of Sainte-Abre in Poitiers may anticipate this development) but they must be recognised as distinct types in medieval art. Perhaps the branches growing out of these masks may always be referred back to the dark root of evil but it has been pointed out that the faces with leaves coming out of the nose can have a more specific meaning,41 and can be interpreted in accordance with the text: See, how they hold the branch to the nose. Ezekiel 8.17, and allude to the idolaters to whom God would show no mercy. It is not always possible to distinguish between the demons and the damned (who also belong to the Devil). Sometimes snakes or dragons come out of the mouth instead of leaves but, as we have seen, in early medieval art branches may freely change into diabolical beasts or birds and it is not improbable that they all sprout from a common root stock.
The mask itself is capable of changing into animal form. The most common variant of the human mask is the cat mask. The foliate cat mask is frequently seen in the decorated initials of manuscripts, very often the Beatus initial of the Psalter where it forms the bar between the bows of the letter B, but it seems to be readily interchangeable with the human form which is also used in this way as, for example, in the Folkunge Psalter,42 in the Royal Library in Copenhagen.
The cat mask is reproduced on a capital, dating from 1120, in St. Kyneburga's, Castor, near Peterborough. In this carving it is, apparently, an anthropomorphic feline since it grasps the branches coming out of the mouth with human hands.
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The basic type of Romanesque leaf mask is also represented at Castor in its two most common forms, one with the foliage coming out of the mouth, the other with foliage coming from the nose. In spite of all its bizarre shape shifting the motif can almost always be recognised with reference to one of these forms.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 43 who deplored the extravagant use of grotesque imagery in the Cluniac monasteries, did not specifically mention the figures with leaves sprouting from their faces in his inventory of "admirable deformed beauties and beautiful deformities", but many of them would qualify for inclusion among the "unclean apes".
The usual place for leaf masks (and other "beautiful deformities") in Romanesque churches is on capitals, but they are also found on corbels, fonts and tympana. If, however, sacred subjects are also represented on the tympanum the leaf mask is placed in a separate, usually dearly defined zone, such as the border. A possible exception of this general rule appears at Elkstone, Gloucestershire.44 The figures represented on the tympanum include Christ enthroned, his right hand raised in a gesture of blessing, his left hand holding the Book of Judgement; the symbols of the four evangelists; the Agnus Dei, signifying the Passion of Christ, and an angel in the corner on the fight hand side of Christ while in the corner on the left hand side of Christ is "a grotesque from the mouth of which comes a scroll of leaf ornament". This grotesque may certainly be recognised as a leaf mask. The foliated scrolls coming from his mouth extend to frame the other figures so this apparent "maverick'' may, after all, represent the border. It does, however, occupy the position which, in scenes of the Last Judgement, is often filled by sinners, rejected by Christ and on their way to Hell.
One of the best known leaf masks in English Romanesque sculpture is the demon on a capital of the south doorway of Kilpeck church, in Herefordshire. The branches probably stylised vine coming out of his mouth bear both leaves and fruit.
The same plant motif appears on the tympanum. It may, in this case, be a purely decorative motif, not intended to represent the Tree of Life,45 but, were such an interpretation permissible, Tree of Life symbolism could have a particular significance in relation to the demon. The Tree of Life was also the tree from which Eve plucked the forbidden fruit (sometimes she takes the fruit directly from the jaws of the serpent).46 It could be Arbor mala as well as Arbor bona.47
Although it is not possible to explain every individual example of the fantastic leaf mask some of the fantasy is, no doubt, purely decorative, and explanations of particular "grotesques" must always be offered with extreme caution yet, collectively, their meaning in quite clear: they are demons and spectres of the demon wood. A tradition of meaning was established for the motif in the early Middle Ages and our problem, and adventure, is to discover what new ideas expanded the range of meaning as the fantasy was spun out in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to produce the Green Man.
(ii) the Era of the Green Man
Early in the thirteenth century the style of leaf ornament changed, and the foliate head, which was used as a variant form of leaf ornament, changed correspondingly. Quite distinct changes of style occurred in France, Germany and England, but gradually the French style influenced the development of the motif in the other two countries, first in Germany and later, towards the end of the century, in England.
Before considering these changes, mention must be made of a foliate head which, though it clearly belongs to the Green Man story, represents an exceptional, possibly unique episode in it.
It is carved on the basin of a fountain made in or about the year 1200 for the Cloisters of the Abbey of Saint-Denis and is one of a series of heads, each one representing a different Roman
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deity. Every head has the name of the god inscribed above it, and the name given to the leaf mask is Silvan. 48
The Silvanus of Saint Denis is a iconographical puzzle since Silvanus was never represented in the form of a leaf mask in antiquity and there is no evidence to suggest that the motif was widely known as Silvanus in the Middle Ages. It has oak leaves growing from the brow and is rather similar to the Bacchus figure illustrated in the Encyclopaedia of Rabanus Maurus.49 It would seem, therefore, that the artist had simply imagined the old woodland god in this way, and used the motif to express his own idea.
The foliate heads of thirteenth century France are of two main types, distinguished by the differences in their formal structure, and known respectively as the Tête de Feuilles and the Masque Feuillu. Four examples of the Tête de Feuilles are illustrated in the book of architectural notes and drawings made by the master mason Villard de Honnecourt about the year 1235.50 He shows two kinds of "metamorphosis": human faces changing into leaves (the head on a human neck and shoulders), and leaves changing into human faces (in one case, a duster of leaves and in the other, a single leaf on a stalk). He calls them all by the purely descriptive name Tête de Feuilles.
Drawings of Têtes de Feuilles after Villard de Honnecourt, m35.
In the Tête de Feuilles, as in the leaf masks of antiquity, the human and leafy elements are fused into one "organic" whole, and so differs from the other type of foliate head common in the thirteenth century in which the two elements remain distinct entities no matter how intimately they may be interwoven. Since Villard de Honnecourt did not illustrate this type we do not know whether or not the would have called it a Tête de Feuille
s too, but it is now generally called a Masque Feuillu (occasionally Masque Herbu) in recognition of the somewhat different structure. The Tête de Feuilles derives directly from the antique leaf masks whereas the Masque Feuillu derives partly from the early medieval leaf demons with foliated tendrils and branches coming from the mouth or nose. The two types cannot, however, be regarded as two distinct motifs because intermediate forms can be found partly of one type, partly of the other; they tend to converge and overlap rather that to diverge and become two separate "species".
Both types are represented, side by side, in a group of three foliate heads above the portal of the south transept of Chartres cathedral. The single Tête de Feuilles (an acanthus mask) has, on
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