I. INTRODUCTION
On 20 October 1496, Joanna of Castile (Joanna the Mad, Juana la Loca, 1479–1555), second daughter of the Catholic Kings, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, was married to Archduke Philip the Handsome, the son of Emperor Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy, in Lier (Lierre), north of Brussels, as part of a double wedding intended to strengthen the alliance between Austria and Spain.Footnote 1 Some weeks later, in the evening hours of 15 December, a ‘joyous entry’ (‘joyeuse entrée’ in French, ‘blijde inkomst’ in Flemish) was held at Brussels in order to honour the new duchess of Brabant. On this occasion, twenty-seven tableaux vivants were staged (for further elements see below), notwithstanding the precarious financial situation of the city, which had been nearly insolvent at that time.Footnote 2 According to the prologue to a lavishly illustrated manuscript which forms the centrepiece of the present article, citizens and dignitaries of Brussels welcomed Joanna with ‘widely extended arms’, ‘their hearts overflowing with sympathy’.Footnote 3 Apparently the municipal authorities tried to meet the Spanish princess in the most sumptuous and appealing way. This attitude may be explained first and foremost by the hope for financial amelioration once good political ties had been secured through the new duchess. In the end, however, all these efforts were in vain: the following years saw an increasing distance between city and court; Philip the Handsome and even more so Margaret of Austria made Mechelen their preferred residence.Footnote 4
Before entering into a detailed discussion of the two tableaux vivants with musical subject matter, their symbolic value and their contribution to a splendid feast of the arts celebrated on the occasion of Joanna's entry, the political significance of the event itself needs to be addressed. Ruling the Low Countries was always a difficult matter, not only for the dukes of Burgundy, but also for the Habsburg dynasty. Given the close proximity of many powerful trading cities, jealously observing their respective privileges, any political change from one ruler to the next, but also within the same dynasty, resulted in a certain vacuum of power. Political authority had to be reconfirmed, privileges had to be renegotiated and thus the relationship between sovereign and subjects rebalanced.Footnote 5 Part of this process was a specific ceremony known in the Low Countries as the ‘joyous entry’,Footnote 6 often with tableaux vivants staged alongside a processional route that guided the new sovereign through the main cities of his (or her) territory. Since 1356, when Joanna of Brabant had followed her father, John III, as duchess of Brabant in female succession, the act of recognising the new sovereign had been formalised. On the occasion of a joyous entry, political expectations could be addressed; for that reason it should not be confused with other forms of solemn or triumphal entries and their pomp and circumstances.Footnote 7 To underline the reciprocity of exchange between ruler and subjects the historian Wim Blockmans has characterised the overall situation as ‘dialogue imaginaire entre princes et sujets’.Footnote 8
Even if the Berlin manuscript cannot claim to be a ‘véritable reportage iconographique’Footnote 9 – it forms part of what the art historian Birgit Franke has appropriately called ‘Fiktionsapparat’Footnote 10 – we have quite a precise idea of what these tableaux vivants staged for Joanna of Castile looked like, or how they would ideally have been realised. In total, this manuscript, which in all likelihood was painted in Brussels close to the event itself, contains sixty-three coloured pen-and-ink drawings on paper. After the opening depiction of the patron saint of Brussels, the Archangel Michael triumphing over the devil (fol. 1v), the first section (fols. 3r–31r) offers illustrations of several delegations, both sacred and secular. Welcoming the Spanish princess on the one hand, these groups ‘represented’ the city of Brussels in the proper sense of the word through the totality of its single members. The sequence of delegations follows a general pattern comparable to the ommegang, Brussels's most important religious feast, celebrated annually on the Sunday before Pentecost in honour of a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary in Notre Dame du Sablon (Onze Lieve Vrouw van de Zavel).Footnote 11
A series of twenty-seven tableaux vivants follows in the second section (fols. 32r–59r). This number is by no means exceptional. One year earlier, in 1495, thirty-five tableaux, mainly based on subjects taken from the five books of Moses, had been staged for Philip the Handsome, entering Brussels as the new duke of Brabant. When dealing with this event in his large-scale chronicle, Jean Molinet unfortunately restricts himself to a brief mention of ‘fitting’ histoires, without going into any detail: ‘The streets of the city through which he had to pass were richly hung, and its crossroads remarkably decorated with “histoires”, thirty-five in all, based on the Books of Moses, very fitting for the arrival and reception of my aforesaid Lord.’Footnote 12 (These tableaux probably underlined the example of Moses as the first legislator, while at the same time conveying historical symbolism.Footnote 13) In 1486, when Maximilian I made his joyous entry as newly elected King of the Holy Roman Empire, the same author only estimates the number of tableaux: ‘de .XL. à .L. hystoires bibliennes et morales’.Footnote 14
As the only late fifteenth-century picture book devoted to a joyous entry, the Berlin manuscript is unique and therefore a source of singular importance.Footnote 15 It is well known to theatre historians thanks to Max Herrmann, who published most of the miniatures as early as 1914 in his pioneering study on the history of medieval and Renaissance theatre,Footnote 16 but less known to historians and art historians, who have not dealt at any significant length with inv. 78.D.5 before the 1990s, when they began highlighting issues of ceremony and communication in public spaces,Footnote 17 concepts of gender and female rulership,Footnote 18 and the genre of tableaux vivants and its performative qualities.Footnote 19 Surprisingly, it has not been used as a source by most of Joanna's biographers,Footnote 20 among whom we may also reckon the only specialised contribution on Joanna and music by Mary Duggan,Footnote 21 nor by local historiansFootnote 22 and musicologists when dealing with festive culture in late medieval Brussels.Footnote 23
As will be demonstrated later in this essay, music as represented in Joanna's joyous entry offers, far beyond a simple manifestation of power, a complex layer of meaning: hidden messages have been musically disguised, uncommon biblical or even extra-biblical subjects become vehicles for multiple identities.Footnote 24 The ambiguous role of music, lacking the status of an autonomous art in the given context, but forming part of an overarching multi-sensory event, as well as the lack of a codified repertory of compositions that can be allocated to specific events, may well have contributed to the general reluctance of musicologists to deal with this field of research. Despite the vast literature on medieval and Renaissance festive culture,Footnote 25 music ‘traditionally falls outside the focus of studies of ceremonial entries’.Footnote 26 Thus this essay may also contribute to a history of music within late medieval (joyous, ceremonial, triumphal, etc.) entries – music actually performed and music as represented – that remains to be written,Footnote 27 notwithstanding the scarcity of information provided by chronicles and other sources as the basic obstacle.Footnote 28 As a matter of fact, our knowledge of some of the most spectacular entries of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy is primarily based on chronicles, whereas pictorial evidence is lacking.Footnote 29 Casting a spotlight on the general problem is Jean Molinet's laconic mention of the festive apparatus provided for Joanna in Antwerp in September 1496 once she had arrived in the Low Countries: ‘pluseurs histoires par personages furent faites par ceulx de la ville, qui longz seroyent à les reciter’.Footnote 30 He does not even mention her entry into Brussels the same year!Footnote 31 Apparently the wedding ceremony in Lier on 20 October 1496 had been far more important for Molinet and other chroniclers than any of the ensuing joyous entries.Footnote 32
In the following I will deal more or less exclusively with the first and last tableau, showing Jubal and his half-brother Tubalcain, the biblical inventors of music, on the one hand (fol. 32r; see Figure 1 below), and St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary on the other hand (fol. 59r; see Figure 2 below). The remaining scenes are mainly devoted to powerful women taken from the Bible, mythology and history, none with musical content. Following the Jubal tableau, there are eight Old Testament heroines (fols. 33r–41r) and nine mythological personages (fols. 43r–51r) – among them Judith killing Holofernes (fol. 33r), Tobias and Sarah (fols. 34r and 35r), Isaac and Rebecca (fol. 39r), Semiramis and Penthesilea (fols. 47r and 51r) – providing exemplary models and representing particular female virtues as well as the ensuing personages. A key position separating the realms of Bible and mythology is held by a depiction of Joanna's mother, Queen Isabella of Castile, subduing Boabdil, the last moorish King of Granada, in 1492 (fol. 42r). In the final segment of the manuscript (fols. 52r–59r), which is organised in a less homogeneous way than the previous ones, characters taken from the Bible (fol. 52r: Salomon and the Queen of Sheba; fol. 54r: Deborah inciting Baruch and his warriors; fol. 55r: Jael killing Sisera), history (fol. 53r: the betrothal of Florentius and Meriana) and mythology (fol. 57r: the Judgement of Paris) become intertwined with genre motifs (fol. 56r: ‘Tres virgines’; fol. 58r: ‘Domus delicie et iocu[n]ditatis’) and hagiography (fol. 59r: St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary). At the end, the coats of arms of Joanna of Castile and Philip the Handsome (fol. 60r) and their respective territories (fol. 61r) are displayed on two heraldic pages.Footnote 33 It is important to remember that these characters are part of an overall programme intended to associate the Spanish princess, daughter of the Catholic Kings, with the subject of powerful women as the female counterpart to the ‘Nine Worthies’, explored by late-medieval authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Thomas III of Saluzzo, Sébastien Mamerot and others, and displayed within pictorial cycles of both miniature and monumental format.Footnote 34
The Berlin manuscript does not offer high-quality miniature paintings a noble patron would contemplate in his studiolo or proudly present to foreign visitors, but drafts in the format of coloured pen-and-ink drawings. These are lively in character, but more or less rudely executed in detail.Footnote 35 Admittedly nothing is known for certain about the original function the Berlin manuscript may have fulfilled – a formal dedication is lacking. Good knowledge of Latin on behalf of the reader is taken for granted; otherwise neither the prologue nor the short, yet sophisticated explanations of each single tableau vivant would have been understandable. This basic prerequisite for a proper understanding would be quite unproblematic for Joanna, who had enjoyed an excellent education.Footnote 36 We can only speculate, however, that if conceived as a preparatory version, the Berlin manuscript might have been intended to serve as a model for further dissemination in a printed festive report enhancing the glory of both city and court.Footnote 37 The case of Archduke Charles, later Habsburg Emperor Charles V, and his entry into Bruges on 15 April 1515 can be cited as slightly later evidence in this respect: in addition to a luxury manuscript with splendid miniature paintings on parchment accompanying the extensive report written by the court secretary Remy du Puys, both a printed version in French with basically the same set of illustrations, reduced to the format of woodcuts, and a Flemish rhymed version lacking illustrations have survived.Footnote 38
II. THE INVENTION OF MUSIC – JUBAL AND TUBALCAIN
The first tableau (Figure 1) is one of the most sumptuous of the entire cycle.Footnote 39 Exactly one dozen characters fill the narrow stage, which consists of barely covered wooden beams and green curtains to be moved sideways in order to reveal the main scene.Footnote 40 Left in the foreground, an old man is sitting on a low stool, writing on a leaf (or tablet?) with barely recognisable staff notation. He seems to experience a moment of inspiration, since his gaze is directed upward, with his left hand touching his temple. Next to him in the middle section of the stage a young smith is hammering on an anvil at which two more smiths are pursuing their craft. In second row, five nobles are making music. A young woman and a young man are depicted singing from a single leaf. Apparently a second female singer standing nearby belongs to the vocal group, too. Instrumental accompaniment is provided by the next two performers, a lute-playing woman and a recorder player, the former directing her flirtatious gaze outwards, as if to the spectator, the latter standing relatively isolated in the middle of the stage as if absorbed by his music.Footnote 41 On the right, the attention of two auxiliary figures seems to be attracted by the anvil in the centre; a third one, whose rustic appearance is intensified by the rendering in profile, looks up to the heading in capital letters, fixed to the upper beam of the stage: ‘Tubal inventor musice’.Footnote 42 Additional information is given on the lower beam: ‘Tubal Caim’. Both inscriptions reveal the biblical subject matter, further developed by medieval authors:
And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived, and brought forth Henoch: and he built a city, and called the name thereof by the name of his son Henoch. And Henoch begot Irad, and Irad begot Maviael, and Maviael begot Mathusael, and Mathusael begot Lamech: Who took two wives: the name of the one was Ada, and the name of the other Sella. And Ada brought forth Jabel: who was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of herdsmen. And his brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of them that play upon the harp and the organs. Sella also brought forth Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron.Footnote 43
Figure 1 The invention of music. © Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. 78.D.5, fol. 32r
According to the Bible, the inventors of earthly handicrafts descended from Lamech, who in turn belonged to Cain's progeny. When hearing the hammering of his half-brother Tubalcain, the inventor of smithery, Jubal discovered the musical proportions and thus became ‘the father of them that play upon harp and the organs’ (‘pater canentium cithara et organo’, according to the Vulgate), admittedly a kind of biblical Pythagoras.Footnote 44 Before scrutinising the Jubal tableau, its iconographical sources and symbolical value, let me expand the biblical horizon by bringing into the discussion two medieval perspectives. According to the important twelfth-century French theologian Petrus Comestor, Jubal inscribed the secrets of music on two columns, since Adam had prophesied two judgements: a column of brick should protect his art against fire, a marble column against the waters of deluge.Footnote 45 In his world chronicle dedicated to Philip the Handsome, Johannes de Vico (c. 1500) renders the subject as follows:
Jubal [is] the father of those singing to harp and organ, that is the inventor of music. He inscribed [music] on two columns against the Deluge and the Fire, one of them made of marble, the other of brick. Tubalcain [is] the inventor of the art of smithery, of works of art sculpted in metal. Tubal [sic], delighted by the sounding hammers of the latter, was the first to discover the [musical] proportions out of these [hammers].Footnote 46
Consequently, within the context of late-medieval chronicles, more or less based on Comestor's famous Historia scholastica and its various derivatives, copies, translations and further modifications,Footnote 47 many isolated depictions of both Jubal and Tubalcain can be found, rendered as inventors in their own right, without a bridge between smithery and music.
The Speculum humanae salvationis contributes the second main branch of medieval Jubal iconography.Footnote 48 Within this important devotional treatise the main stations of the history of salvation are foreshadowed by three prefigurations, each taken from the Old Testament. In chapter 23, the figure of Jubal corresponds to Christ nailed to the Cross as first figura. Christ in turn produces the sweetest sound ever heard on earth, when praying to God the Father: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23: 34). The chordophone with its strings stretched over a piece of wood is fundamental for the typological approach, juxtaposing the musical instrument with the tortured, yet musically resounding body of Christ on the Cross. Although typology may be distant from modern readings, it is the manner in which medieval people conceived biblical history, and thus the history of mankind. (For a further discussion of typology and its relevance for the proper understanding of the 1496 tableaux vivants see below, §IV.)
These two pictorial traditions have been fused in the miniature on fol. 32r of the Berlin manuscript and its underlying ‘model’ as staged in Brussels. The old man to the left in the foreground, far away from being a simple writer of music,Footnote 49 can thus be identified with Jubal realising the musical proportions once he has heard his half-brother Tubalcain hammering on the anvil, the former probably modelled according to depictions of King David as inspired author of the psalms.Footnote 50 (Admittedly, if we did not have the inscription naming ‘Tubal’, one could easily think of Pythagoras listening to the blacksmiths, and all the more since there are three of them, whereas only Jubal is named in the Bible, and no mention is made of the number of Tubalcain's hammers. Apparently not only the two above-mentioned iconographical traditions, but also the two different stories of Jubal and Pythagoras have been conflated.) In contrast, the female lutenist in the background seems to fulfil a function which is otherwise Jubal's task in the illustrations to the Speculum humanae salvationis: normally portrayed with a psaltery, lute or harp, Jubal transforms the acoustic raw material provided by the sounds of smithery into ‘music’ following the theoretical (mainly proportional) foundations of ars musica.Footnote 51 Noteworthy is the well-balanced triangular constellation within our miniature, circumscribed by the youthful Tubalcain, the senior Jubal and the female lutenist. In terms of the overall composition, at least five pictorial elements are virtually chained together by mere proximity: Tubalcain's hammer (1), frozen in its movement, stands close to the small leaflet or tablet (2) balanced on Jubal's right knee, on which the latter is scribbling a few lines of otherwise undecipherable notation. At the same time, the head of the hammer is visually connected to the upward movement of Jubal's left forearm (3), which in turn finds its apex in the left-hand fingers touching his temple (4). Calculated as well seems to be the proximity between this gesture and the female lutenist's hand (5), plucking the lute strings with a small quill and with her intense gaze directed outwards, as if to Joanna, who should be considered here as the ideal spectator and focal point of attention.
III. THE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OF THE TABLEAU VIVANT
In addition to the iconography of tableaux vivants, a number of intriguing questions related to the genre itself could be raised, but ultimately remain unanswerable. How did the actors behave? Did Tubalcain and his fellow smiths hammer noisily on the anvil, or did they fall into a power-consuming attitude as if frozen in their movement? Did the nobles perform a courtly chanson with lute and recorder accompaniment, or did they only pretend to make music? In other words: did the curtains open on this first tableau to reveal the invention of music with a charming demonstration of its achievements or in a moment of utmost silence? Admittedly, we can only speculate about the concrete performing conditions of Joanna's entry and its tableaux vivants and its similarity to the genre flourishing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when noble and bourgeois spectators took delight in silent refigurations mainly derived from antique works of art or ‘frozen’ pantomimic actions.Footnote 52 The medieval tableau does not necessarily fullfil these basic requirements – living actors on stage, artificially arranged in silent, petrified images in order to set free emotions – even if some of these characteristics may well have occurred in the Middle Ages.Footnote 53
In the introduction to the Berlin manuscript, ‘personagiae’ is used as terminus technicus for the ensuing theatrical representations:
What follows are the images or arrangements of figures (called ‘personagiae’) on platforms, that is high and closed scaffolds, installed alongside the street corners, sometimes hidden by curtains which have been used for that purpose, other times unveiled at the right moment to the eyes of the passers-by. These [arrangements] had the effect of delighting the minds of everybody, particularly, however, the erudite, not only by the appropriate representation of deeds and the wonderfully sumptuous display, but also by the application of the most fitting meaning.Footnote 54
‘Personagiae’ is evidently a Latinisation of the French term ‘histoire(s) par personages’, frequently encountered in Molinet's chronicle,Footnote 55 among others. ‘Esschaufadia’, on the other hand, takes the ephemeral decorations and their wooden stage constructions (scaffolds) as point of reference. Similarly, the court chronicler Remy du Puys makes use of the latter designation (‘eschauffaults’) in his extensive description of Archduke Charles's entry into Bruges in 1515.Footnote 56
With all its pen-and-ink drawings, the Berlin manuscript offers drafts, but hardly reflects the singular event in its concrete details and the overall performative quality.Footnote 57 As we learn from descriptions in chronicles, joyous entries were usually staged in the evening hours, with hundreds of torches providing light and adding glamour to otherwise prosaic ludic representations, perhaps even compensating shortcomings of the concrete performance.Footnote 58 Besides colour and light, sound must be added as an important factor, even if we risk contradicting the modern notion of tableau vivant, with its basic requirement of actors behaving ‘silently’ and ‘petrified’. According to the Excellente cronike van vlaenderen, ‘many lovely plays were given by silent characters between the city gate [sc. Holy Cross] and court [sc. Prinsenhof]’ on 18 March 1496 (1497) on the occasion of Philip's and Joanna's entry into Bruges.Footnote 59 According to a Flemish chronicle describing the 1440 entry of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy into the same city to be reconciled after strong upheaval, circumstantial instrumental music was provided for most of its tableaux.Footnote 60 Moreover, when Archduke Charles entered Bruges in 1515, dozens of civic trumpeters made their appearance, posing with their silver trumpets behind the pinnacles of the ephemeral architecture, as we can learn from Remy du Puys's lavishly illuminated festive report. By such means, the theatrical representations and their political messages received a heraldic aura. Even the explicatory scrolls found in the Berlin manuscript, apparently fixed to the wooden beams of the ephemeral stage constructions, might imply the level of sound: it is not too far-fetched to think of a loud, solemn declamation of these words at the moment when the princess and her entourage moved from one station to the next.Footnote 61
Be that as it may, we can easily imagine a situation where civic or court musicians provided a suitable accompaniment for all these tableaux, be it on stage, on the side, or even behind the stage. Both the city of Brussels and Philip the Handsome, the latter keen to acquire the best musicians for his own chapel,Footnote 62 would have been able to fill the gap. The eminent abilities of Brussels's minstrels to perform even a polyphonic repertory are attested thanks to a contemporary payment record: ‘En 1495, le 25 juillet, 9 livres 8 sols aux ménestrels de Bruxelles, pour avoir joué de leurs instruments plusieurs chansons de musicque.’Footnote 63 Even if there is much less archival evidence for Brussels than for Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent or Mechelen, since the civic account books are available only for the years 1485 and 1498–1508,Footnote 64 Keith Polk nonetheless generalises as follows:
Brussels provided vigorous patronage of instrumental music. Highly qualified players were resident there, and a continuous traffic of performers in and out of the city connected Brussels into a highly interactive court and urban network. A varied repertory of sacred and secular instrumental music was demanded of these musicians, calling for highly sophisticated performance practices.Footnote 65
Later in this article I will come back to the issue of music as performed on stage and as merely depicted.
IV. EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT MEANINGS
For all depictions contained within the Berlin manuscript on its recto pages, both the welcoming delegations and the tableaux vivants, a short Latin commentary faces the respective miniatures on the verso. It summarises the official message in two sentences according to a strictly observed model of comparison:
The first figure displays how Jubal or Tubal discovered the sweet melody of music thanks to the sounding of hammers. Thus Joanna of Spain will unite thousands of subjects in one accord of peace by the strong authority which she acquired over thirty countries.Footnote 66
So far, historians have shown little interest in these explanations – when they have not simply passed them over for the sake of an isolated ‘reading’ of the images.Footnote 67 Indeed, comparing Jubal to Joanna, the sound of hammers to the new duchess's ‘gravis auctoritas’, may sound so far-fetched to modern earsFootnote 68 that one might easily miss an important point of reference, pivotal, however, for a proper understanding. The binary syntax to be found in these lines, with the respective comparison to Joanna attached by ‘sic’ and ensuing consecutive clause, follows the typological model. Unlike proper biblical typology, however, the point of reference is detached from the history of salvation, but directed towards Joanna of Castile according to the post-figurative thought and ‘historical symbolism’ cultivated at the court of Burgundy as nowhere else in fifteenth-century Europe.Footnote 69 Especially in view of the Old Testament heroines mentioned below, Joanna herself might even be cast in the light of salvation history.
The relevance of iconographical models provided by the Speculum for Joanna's entry has not so far been recognised. Besides Jubal, the following characters, mostly belonging to the cycle of Old Testament heroines, can be traced to this important typological source:Footnote 70 Judith decapitating Holofernes (fol. 33r; cf. Speculum, ch. XXX, 2); the betrothal of Tobias and Sarah (fol. 34r; cf. Speculum, ch. VI, 2); the woman of Thebez killing Abimelech by throwing a stone (fol. 36r; cf. Speculum, ch. XXXVIII, 2); Rebecca and Eliezer (fol. 39r; cf. Speculum, ch. VII, 4); the dream of Astyarges (fol. 41r; cf. Speculum, ch. III, 2); Tomyris killing Cyrus (fol. 49r; cf. Speculum, ch. XXX, 4); Jael killing Sisera (fol. 55r; cf. Speculum, ch. XXX, 3). Although the literary and iconographical tradition of the ‘Nine Worthies’ (neuf preux, neuf preuses) cannot be underestimated with respect to the choir of personages such as Jael and Judith,Footnote 71 the otherwise arcane figure of Jubal is a strong argument in favour of the Speculum humanae salvationis as the principal source for the female characters staged in 1496. Moreover, the post-typological rhetoric to be found in the accompanying Latin inscriptions is clearly indebted to the Speculum. Its author probably had exactly this rather sophisticated level of typological comparison in mind when speaking of ‘tropologia’ as one of the main intellectual riches of the tableaux vivants staged for Joanna.Footnote 72 Admittedly, an elaborate ‘iconic’ system comparable to the famous later emblem books by Cesare Ripa or Andrea Alciati was not yet available in 1496; for that reason, political ideas had to be visualised on a different basis in order to work within the intended ‘dialogue imaginaire’.Footnote 73
A slightly later example may reveal the genuine potential inherent in the ‘typological contemporization of the past’:Footnote 74 on the occasion of Archduke Charles's entry into Bruges in 1515, King David playing his harp in the Temple of Jerusalem in front of the Ark of the Covenant was perceived as a prefiguration of Count Baldwin I of Flanders, who had offered the precious relic of St Donatian to Bruges and thus laid the foundation for the city's further prosperity.Footnote 75 Overarched by a model inherited from the history of salvation, lordship could be further exalted. In the same Bruges entry, the Spanish merchants made use of musical imagery in order to convey an allegory of power. Among many other tableaux given on this occasion, Orpheus made his appearance playing the harp within a iardin de plaisance. In fact, this character could easily have been identified with the 15-year-old prince, since Charles's inclination towards music was particularly strong.Footnote 76 As mentioned earlier, the secretary of court, Remy du Puys, has left a detailed commentary on this occasion, explaining what he thought the Spaniards' intention had been. Of course, the well-tuned harp is a symbol of Charles's powerful reign over prosperous countries, but Remy draws a strange comparison: like a spider hidden in the centre of his web, Charles exercises strength and centralising power within his reign:
I believe that by the means of this garden they wish to symbolise the reign and the countries of the young prince flourishing in all goods, honours and virtuous delights. They have placed this figure in the centre [of the garden], just as a spider is hidden in its web, in order to be as close as possible to his subjects, to be able to arrive at the borders of all parts [of his state] as well as possible and in the most convenient way, if this should become necessary, and foremost in order to tune so sweetly the instrument of his behaviour, that is the institution of his reign, in perfect consonance and a melodious harmony of all excellent virtues, as well as to attract those [subjects] near and far to the fellowship and ardent desire of his great fame and glorious renown, as occurred with the very wise son of King David and Duke Philip of Burgundy of recent memory, the young prince's great-grandfather, to whose honour and example he should be spurred for the most part by the domestic models of his good parents, who are and should be in the future a pungent prick to him, stimulating his lively audacity towards all excellence of royal perfection.Footnote 77
I have dealt elsewhere with this fascinating tableau and Remy du Puys, who might be called an ideal eyewitness, so I will not go into further detail.Footnote 78 Compared with the figure of Orpheus as a symbol of the peaceful harmony in which Archduke Charles will rule over his territories, the Jubal iconography has an arcane touch with regard to Charles's mother. Why Jubal? Why didn't Joanna face a powerful Lady Music as the first tableau,Footnote 79 not to speak of a concert of the muses as obvious alternative? The former could have been quite an attractive subject, as we see it depicted in the almost contemporaneous woodcut from the encyclopedia Marguerita philosophica of the Carthusian scholar Gregor Reisch, published in Freiburg in 1503 and subsequently in Strasbourg in 1504.Footnote 80 Here, a Lady Music of monumental appearance is accompanied by several musicians, Pythagoras and a poet, the latter crowned with a laurel wreath, supposedly alluding to Conrad Celtis. An alternative setting of Lady Music might have been one drawing upon the pictorial tradition that emerged in trecento art with the allegory of music accompanied by Jubal, who would underline the biblical foundation of music, as opposed to the Greek authority of Pythagoras. The main question with respect to Joanna's entry as mirrored in the Berlin manuscript therefore is not so much concerned with iconography (and thus the identification of pictorial topoi), but with the underlying strategies of the person in charge of programming the event, and of the silent impact of both tradition and convention that guided his choice of motifs and finally resulted in the sequence of tableaux vivants. Even if late medieval entries shared a common repertory, single motifs could deliberately have been chosen according to the occasion and the personality in question.Footnote 81 In this respect, the perspective on women is quite different from that on men. When staging a queen's entry, one of the most important virtues to be underlined by the choice of tableaux vivants was humility.Footnote 82 Perhaps Lady Music ruling an extensive company or even dominating the biblical male ‘patriarch’ of music would have contradicted the ideal of a humble noble woman, presented to the 17-year-old Joanna on more than one occasion. With Jubal and Tubalcain as the main figures of the first tableau, the idea of music emphasizes a strong male perspective.
Besides gendering, however, a second aspect is remarkable: Taking the ‘aural magnificence of royalty’Footnote 83 as a prerequisite for medieval entries, both the rather sophisticated choice of the Jubal iconographyFootnote 84 and the accompanying basse musique of the first tableau (whether performed or merely imaginativeFootnote 85) must have come as a surprise for most spectators of Joanna's entry, apparently contradicting the ‘“shared musical vocabulary” or set of aural expectations and associations’.Footnote 86 Rather than the outwardly representational means of a predominantly loud ceremonial music of trumpets and drums, we see here a more sophisticated, perhaps even personalised, approach (see below, §VII). In this context it is useful to bear in mind the overall dramaturgy of Joanna's entry: having passed a plethora of civic delegations, with the archers (‘arbalistae’), amidst whom Joanna was depicted riding on a mule according to the Spanish custom, at the very end (fol. 31r),Footnote 87 the general tension must have reached a climax, with all expectations directed to the unveiling of the first tableau. According to Gordon Kipling, the initial positions of a joyous entry were predestined for particularly refined messages and a specific imagery aimed at the occasion and the personality in question. On 11 December 1440, when Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy imposed a spectacular rite of reconciliation on the formerly rebellious city of Bruges, images of St John the Baptist propheseying the Saviour's advent and of St Job on the dungheap had been presented in the first two tableaux, the former staged in front of the Holy Cross gate, the latter behind it.Footnote 88 Given the date during Advent, Philip could easily have been identified with the Messiah. By contrast, the presence of St Job, superscribed ‘Dominus dedit dominus abstulit domino placuit ita factum est’ (‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; as it hath pleased the Lord so is it done’; Job 1: 21),Footnote 89 could function as an ambiguous symbol of temptation and plague both with reference to the duke, who had been bereft of his legitimate property by revolt, and to the citizens of Bruges in penitence, paying homage to their rightful sovereign in bare feet and with heads uncovered. In the case of Joanna of Castile, the political message as unfolded in the official explanation to the first tableau might have been secondary to its pictorial guise and its realisation (or mere imagination) by means of vocal and instrumental chamber music, highlighting the biblical foundation of music and staging the figures of Jubal and Tubalcain as perhaps never before in history. Under these particular circumstances, music as message and identificatory means could reflect both the city of Brussels and the apparently ambitious claims and musical inclinations of the archduke's bride. In this respect it does not matter if the municipal authorities were relying on first-hand information from the Spaniards, or if they tacitly took this for granted, given Joanna's high social status (see below, §VII).
V. SAINT LUKE PORTRAYING THE VIRGIN MARY
Approaching towards the end of the theatrical performances, Joanna of Castile could very well have watched the ‘Judgement of Paris’ (fol. 57r)Footnote 90 and a ‘Domus delicie et iocu(n)ditatis’ (fol. 58r) with no fewer than seventeen characters conveying dance, chant, instrumental music, meat and drink and other earthly delights, not to forget the bridal bed, to which a leering fool draws the spectator's attention.Footnote 91 Admittedly, the joyous entry of our Spanish princess could not end with such a festive yet frivolous topic, but with St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary (fol. 59r; Figure 2), clearly identifiable thanks to the attached subscription in capital letters, reading Maria mater XPI [= Christi] on the upper, Sa(n)ct(us) Lvcas on the lower beam.
Figure 2 Saint Luke portraying the Virgin Mary. © Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. 78.D.5, fol. 59r
Sitting behind his easel and equipped with palette and brushes, the Evangelist is shown in the act of portraying the Virgin Mary and Child. Admittedly, this is no biblical subject, but an apocryphal scene that had entered into Byzantine sources not before the sixth century.Footnote 92 In the 1496 tableau, it has been enriched by means of angelic musicians in a quite unusual way, thus deviating from a long iconographical tradition: two angels playing on lute and recorder, reminiscent of the Jubal tableau, with two nobles performing on the same two musical instruments (Figure 1), frame the well-balanced main group on both sides. In addition, a huge positive organ is placed in front of the rear wall of the stage, more similar to large contemporary church organs than to the smaller type of a positive or chamber organ. The opened organ wings reveal a chest divided into five blocks, with an elevated middle tower.Footnote 93 The player on the left is bent over his keyboard; the figure behind the organ, blowing the bellows, is looking at the Virgin Mary and Child in the foreground.Footnote 94 It should be noted that this last tableau not only treats St Luke's vision, but, at the same time, the painter and his studio: noteworthy in this respect are the triptych hanging on the rear wall, on the same level with the organ, and the half-length portrait further to the right, exhibiting the painter's proficiency. These details are all the more important if one takes into consideration the stage design and the restrictions of the available space. Not coincidentally, organ and triptych are placed in close proximity to each other, modelled in quite a similar fashion; usually it was painters who decorated organ wings.Footnote 95 In this respect, the 1496 Luke tableau conveys a constellation otherwise known from the astrological imagery of the ‘Children of Mercury’, where organ-builders, painters and sculptors, among others, tend to be depicted in close conjunction with each other, ruled and inspired in their craftsmanship by the personified planet.Footnote 96 Even if we can only speculate on the possibility that such iconography might have inspired the person in charge of conceiving the Brussels tableau vivant, the pictorial message in itself is revealing, assigning the organ to the painter's competence and place of work – besides the primary musical context of rejoicing angels.
When dealing with music as painted, music as represented on stage and music as performed, we might assume at first sight that the four angels are real musicians. (At least two of them, the lutenist and the recorder player, might even have turned up in different costume in the previously displayed Jubal tableau.) This assumption, however, is by no means certain. Instrumental music, be it performed on organ, lute or recorder, or on altogether different musical instruments, might also have been performed behind, beside or even before the stage.Footnote 97 Moreover, we have to take into account the most surprising yet not totally anachronistic assumption of a ‘mute’ tableau, presented in utter silence.Footnote 98 Rather than speculating on past performances, however, we should ask whether these angel musicians followed certain models. These in turn might be related to concrete experiences offered by late fifteenth-century processions. It is above all in the context of Brussels's most important religious feast, the ommegang, already cited above with regard to the first part of Joanna's entry, that we might expect the enhancement of Marian iconography with images of angelic musicians. In any case: the presence of music-making angels implies an intersection of artistic media: St Luke's vision, entrusted to the medium of panel painting, is enriched by music that is to be conceived as either real or a merely imaginative element.
As in the case of Jubal and Tubalcain, Latin explanatory verses convey the main idea of St Luke and the angelic musicians:
This figure displays how St Luke is drawing a portrait of the Virgin Mary, to the rejoicing of angels. Thus the divine Creator has conducted Joanna in order to embrace the imago of Brabant, and to these circumstances her relations give applause.Footnote 99
In a certain sense, with this official note the circle closes. Whereas the prologue to the Berlin manuscript underlines the hearty welcome that the city of Brussels accorded to Joanna (fol. 2r), here the equivalent is attributed to the Spanish princess, who eagerly ‘embraces the imago of Brabant’. As in the case of Jubal in 1496 and Orpheus in 1515, we may suspect that a contemporary spectator will have understood this tableau on more than one level of meaning. Admittedly, ‘St Luke painting the Virgin Mary’ allows for an official interpretation in political (or rather diplomatic) terms, but this by no means exhausts the possible meanings. Indeed, it may have also alluded at the same time to Joanna's own physical beauty. Jean Molinet, the court poet of the dukes of Burgundy between 1475 and 1507, had, for example, compared the beauty of the Virgin Mary as portrayed by St Luke to that of Mary of Burgundy in one of his ‘reversed analogies’ in the ‘Chappellet des dames’ (1477). According to this poem, it is not the ‘authentic’ icon painted by the evangelist but the living beauty of Mary of Burgundy that sets the standards of comparison to the Virgin Mary:
It is therefore manifest by figure and similarity that our virtuous princess Mary is the living countenance, derivation and image of the sole heavenly empress: not the portrait St Luke had wished to make, but that which the immortal Painter and sovereign Sculptor had wished to shape according to his worthy image and resemblance. This is our Lady, this is our princess, this is our Mary, this is our mistress to whom I am giving this virtuous chaplet and poem thus honouring the Queen of heaven.Footnote 100
Some two decades later, the same Molinet described Joanna of Castile as ‘the most richly adorned that ever was seen before in the land of my lord the archduke’ on her arrival in Antwerp on 19 September 1496.Footnote 101 Set against this background, it is not implausible to assume that Joanna should have felt flattered by the staging of female beauty in Brussels,Footnote 102 foreshadowed as it was in two earlier stations by the mythological subject of Paris and the three Goddesses (fol. 57r), implying that Joanna clearly was the one chosen. In this context the angelic musicians accompanying the Virgin Mary even have the touch of valets de chambre,Footnote 103 easily identifiable with the attendants of the Spanish princess.Footnote 104
In addition, and at least equally important, the figure of St Luke with his sumptuously rendered studio is a fitting means to express corporate identity by representing Brussels painters' guild.Footnote 105 With Rogier van der Weyden, official city painter since at least 1436, one of the most renowned artists of his time had admirably contributed to the subject of the Evangelist as painter.Footnote 106 Rogier's St Luke and the Madonna extraordinarily testifies to fifteenth-century artistic self-consciousness: not without reason, the Evangelist, portraying the Virgin Mary with silver-pen, is thought to present the painter's portrait in disguise.Footnote 107 In 1496, Rogier's panel – in all likelihood commissioned as an altarpiece for the chapel of the painters' guild in the collegiate church of St GudulaFootnote 108 – would have come to the mind of most spectators of Joanna's entry, when presented with a tableau vivant of similar subject matter.
The key position of the St Luke tableau is underlined by an interesting cross-reference: several stations earlier, in one of the few ‘historical’ tableaux, the power of painting in a diplomatic context had already been exhibited with the charming subject of Meriana, a Spanish princess, and Florentius, prince of Milan, falling mutually in love by the mere contemplation of their respective portraits handed over to them by their parents (fol. 53r).Footnote 109
VI. MUSIC, POETRY AND THE IMPACT OF RHETORICIANS
The assumed institutional background of the last tableau has important implications for our interpretation of the first one, thus opening out a further level of meaning. If St Luke ‘represents’ the painters' guild in Brussels, a similar pattern of identity and public display could be assumed for Jubal, Tubalcain and the brotherhood of musicians.Footnote 110 Attractive as this idea may be, however, it faces a serious obstacle in that the patron saint of the local brotherhood of musicians, founded in the mid-fourteenth century, had not been Jubal but Job.Footnote 111 To stage the latter's legend for Joanna, young bride of one of the most handsome and promising princes of European nobility, would have been quite unsuitable for obvious reasons,Footnote 112 quite contrary to the above-mentioned Job tableau within the context of Bruges and the 1440 reconciliation rite.Footnote 113 The nearly contemporaneous altar panel, probably painted in Brussels in the late 1480s, elaborates the legend in all its disgusting details:Footnote 114 left in the foreground, St Job, sitting on a dungheap, is tortured by devils; on the right side, he is depicted tearing the scabs off his festering wounds, which mysteriously transform into golden coins, so that he can reward the three trumpet players who consoled him with their music. In contrast to Job, the biblical patient sufferer, Joanna of Castile would not have to lament the loss of property, but rejoice at arriving in her new homelands, for only in later years would she bear the epitet ‘the Mad’.
Even if the presumed choice of the Jubal iconography would offer a seemingly suitable alternative, there is – iconography aside – a more serious objection still: with respect to both its political and social standing, the musicians' brotherhood, the confraternity of St Job, could by no means claim equal weight with the painters' guild, which, after the crucial year 1421, came to participate in the urban governing body together with craftsmen and merchants.Footnote 115 The notion of a specific tableau vivant staged by the local musicians must, therefore, be discarded.
According to Wim Blockmans, the key positions of Joanna's entry were ‘marked’ by the two corporations that had traditionally been involved in the conception and realisation of a joyous entry: the painters' guild, of course, fabricating all kinds of ephemeral decoration, and the rhetoricians.Footnote 116 Blockman's idea, no more than a passing suggestion in his 1994 article, offers an unexpected yet fascinating solution to our problem, one that nevertheless needs further corroboration in order to work.
The rhetoricians (rhétoriqueurs in French, rederijkers in Dutch), briefly noted, played an eminent role in the theatre and literature of the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and early modern era.Footnote 117 The performance of theatrical plays (zinnespelen), often with Old Testament subject matter, and the organisation of annual competitions, institutionalised since the late fifteenth century as landjuweelen, belonged to their main activities. Particulary noteworthy for our purposes is the main- and back-stage use of tableaux vivants in the rhetoricians' theatre, veiled and unveiled by curtains (probably similar to those depicted in the Berlin manuscript), which allowed for a nuanced message on different levels.Footnote 118 In late medieval Brussels, five chambers of rhetoricians were active; the oldest one, ‘Den Boeck’ (‘The Book’), founded in 1401 and most influential in political and societal terms, even counted the dukes of Brabant among its members.Footnote 119 In general these chambers had four main dignitaries – ‘fool’, ‘dean’, ‘factor’ (principal author of theatrical plays) and ‘prince’ (patron and honorary president).Footnote 120 Only recently have scholars begun to recognise the importance of the rhetoricians – far more than mere bourgeois poetry clubs – in the festive culture of the Low Countries, as well as their double connection to ecclesiastical elites, archers, crossbowmen and other urban corporations.Footnote 121 As it emerges from the Bruges city account books, a festive committee composed of a group of local rhetoricians as well as representatives of the municipal authorities was charged in 1515 with organising Archduke Charles's joyous entry.Footnote 122 We may assume a similar constellation in the forefront of organising Joanna's entry, although nothing is known for certain about the concrete responsibilities.Footnote 123
Given the prominence of ‘the fool’ as institutionalised in the rhetoricians' chambers and their annual competitions – normally with a fool's day, on which occasion the best piece in this genre was awardedFootnote 124 – a distinct influence of the rhetoricians is evidenced by the ‘foolish’ representations featured in the first part of Joanna's entry. This delightful intermezzo (fols. 11r–16r) divides the sequence of official delegations into two sections of approximately equal length. Here we encounter, among other things, a chariot with five masked large-nosed bagpipers (fol. 16r)Footnote 125 alluding to ‘those, pulling the chariot with their faces covered, who compound the most welcome harmony of their art on several bagpipes’,Footnote 126 as well as a ‘natural’ fool, mocked by a group of children (fol. 12r)Footnote 127 and ‘who frequently gave rise to the people's laughter, ravished by his lunatic mind by singing again and again in a loud voice “kyrieleyson” in front of her Highness (alluding to her blossoming youthfulness), in order to make the Gods merciful by his music’.Footnote 128
But how can we actually link the rhetoricians to Jubal as inventor musicae? At first glance no proper point of contact between the urban corporation on the one hand and the biblical iconography on the other is easily identifiable. (The foolish character given in unflattering profile in the upper right corner of the Jubal tableau is not an institutionalised reference to the rhetoricians, but merely contrasts the intellectual pretence – and therefore in the end reinforces the sophisticated choice of motifs.) Here, developments in late medieval poetry come into play. The borderlines between music and rhetoric had already become blurred with the fourteenth-century seconde rhétorique. In his Art de dictier of 1392, Eustache Deschamps, a pupil of Guillaume de Machaut, underlined the intrinsic musical qualities of rhetoric (or poetry), which he defined as a kind of natural music. According to Deschamps, the conjunction of music and poetry resulted in a ‘wedding’ of both sciences:
These two kinds of music are so consonant with each other that each of them can easily be called music, with respect to the sweetness of both chant and text, which are both pronounced and brought forth by the sweetness of the voice and the opening of the mouth. It is with both of them as if it were a marriage in the conjunction of knowledge, with the chants being ennobled and and more seemly thanks to the words and fluency of the verse, that it would not have if it stood alone.Footnote 129
The concept of poetry as ‘espèce de musique’ was further disseminated in the course of the fifteenth century. It can be found in the writings of Jean Molinet, among others, whose importance at the court of Burgundy cannot be overestimated, and even was translated into Dutch.Footnote 130 Matthijs de Castelein (1485–1550) was to become particularly influential as the first translator of seconde rhétorique concepts in his De const van rhetoriken (finished in 1548, but printed only in 1555, five years after the author's death). For Castelein, ‘the oldest of all arts is music, and since she is famed to be the oldest art, she seems to be superior to rhetoric’.Footnote 131 Those two arts – music and rhetoric – which both claimed divine origin, the power of comforting and other strong positive effects, regularly entered into mutual competition.Footnote 132 When celebrating the centenary of the foundation of ‘Den Boeck’ in 1502, music was claimed to hold the place of honour next to poetry.Footnote 133 Later in the sixteenth century Jubal even formed part of a rhetoricians' play: in De wortel van Rethoorijka, written between 1562 und 1578, probably by Rutgaert Iansz, the secrets of music, which Jubal had secluded in a tower (!), are flushed away by the Deluge, whereas the pigeon, personifying rhetoric, can be rescued thanks to Noah's Ark; thus, the superiority of rhetoric as one of the gifts of the Holy Ghost over man-made music is proven.Footnote 134
The otherwise unusual subject of Jubal and Tubalcain in 1496 therefore becomes completely plausible: if poetry is some kind of music, then the biblical inventor of music can be reckoned as its first ancestor.Footnote 135 This reading implies the strong position of the seconde rhétorique, articulated in public space and placed foremost in front of the Spanish princess and new duchess of Brabant. There is yet an alternative, complementary reading of the Jubal tableau and the alleged impact of rhetoricians: to organise a joyous entry, to prepare and determine suitable subjects for all its tableaux vivants, is nothing short of a huge inventio in itself. Staging the first tableau by showing the invention of an art, the art of music, would have been particularly suitable in this respect. Therefore it seems entirely possible to conceive the whole entry as a symbolic narrative, with all the rhetorical rules superimposed on a visual field of expression that brings together politics, diplomacy, exegesis, sound (or even silence), and many other things, drawing upon earlier trends but exemplifying contemporary concerns as well. What is left, however, is primarily the Berlin manuscript that allows us to develop possible readings.
VII. JOANNA AND MUSIC
It would be one-sided to treat the matter only from the viewpoint of rhetoricians, their corporate identity and the stunning musical disguise they applied. In order to achieve a well-balanced interpretation of our tableaux vivants, we must not lose sight of Joanna of Castile herself – at least insofar as she is the primary addressee of all these theatrical efforts. When we consider the opening and the ending of her entry together as endowed with music as primary (or secondary) subject in the staging of the biblical inventor of music and the enrichment of the apocryphal story of St Luke by the means of angelic musicians, music gains an importance in itself that goes beyond the particular scenes. Adding to this is also the noteworthy penultimate tableau, which conveys a ‘Domus delicie et iocu(n)ditatis’ (fol. 58r), with further musical components.Footnote 136 Although the crowded miniature, with no fewer than seventeen figures, makes it difficult to identify all its details, a pipe and tabor player, who provides the musical accompaniment to a dancing couple, is clearly recognisable in the right-side middle ground. He is probably complemented by an Alta ensemble on a separate musicians' balcony in the background.Footnote 137 There is no reason to count this tableau as an ‘allegorical ingredient’,Footnote 138 if Joanna eagerly experienced some of these delights (or all of them) in reality. At least there were ‘grandes regocijos de música y danzas’ in the evening hours of 20 December 1496, according to Lorenzo de Padilla in his Chronicle of Philip the Handsome, completed in 1538 on the order of Emperor Charles V.Footnote 139
Unfortunately, little is known about the musical education Joanna enjoyed. Owing to the lack of satisfactory evidence, the only specialised study on ‘Queen Joanna and her Musicians’ by Mary Duggan (1976) begins only in 1506, the year when her husband died.Footnote 140 According to one of the letters of Joanna's confessor, written after the unexpected death of Philip the Handsome and dealing with Joanna's serious mental condition at that time, ‘she took pleasure in music, an art to which she had committed herself from early in her youth’.Footnote 141 In all probability, Joanna's education in music was similar to that of her brother, the Infante Juan, which is better documented and allows some inferences for her own biography;Footnote 142 instruction in organ-playing, for example, seems to be completely plausible.Footnote 143 At Tordesillas monastery, where Joanna had to spend the long last decades of her life, now called ‘the Mad’, a positive organ regarded as belonging to her personal property is still preserved today.Footnote 144 When arriving in Brabant in 1496, the princess from distant Spain would have had to face a strange country, unable to speak the two main languages of her future home; music might have been suitable to open the door. In this respect the tableaux vivants with musical subject matter discussed in the previous pages gain a more personal touch.
VIII. EPILOGUE
Far from a stereotyped pageant imagery used and reused on more than one festive occasion,Footnote 145 the Jubal and St Luke tableaux vivants convey fascinating aspects of both personal and institutional identity, revealing Joanna's inclinations towards music, the proud patronage of the city of Brussels, its guilds and brotherhoods for the arts, and even allowing for self-positioning on the part of the rhetoricians. A similar set of multiple identities can be proposed for the few music-related items staged some two decades later for Joanna's son, Archduke Charles, on the occasion of his entry into Bruges in 1515. As already mentioned above, the harp-playing Orpheus can be immediately identified with Charles himself, whereas a branle gay seemingly by automata, with hidden musicians, and the spectacular aural sensation of a three-voice cornet ensemble in front of King Solomon's throne – the former staged by the Spanish merchants resident in Bruges, the latter by the Italian ‘nations’ of Florentine, Lucchese and Genoese merchants – testify to a strong manifestation of corporate identity by the means of musical representation.Footnote 146
Owing to the lack of comparable pictorial evidence it is difficult, however, to come to a final assessment of these few seemingly exceptional tableaux in Joanna's or Charles's entry within categories such as tradition vs. innovation, convention vs. originality, female vs. male iconography, etc. At least hypothetically, we should reckon the impact of local festive memory – whoever had been in charge of ‘programming’ Joanna's entry in 1496 would certainly remember her husband's entry into the same city the year before.Footnote 147 The overall constellation becomes even more complicated if one takes into consideration Brussels's close proximity to all the prosperous cities of the Low Countries, observing with curiosity (on some occasions maybe even jealousy) each others' achievements and failures.Footnote 148 In the end, festive representations given on the occasion of a joyous entry not only formed part of public space, but also of public rumour and the cultural dynamics of one of the most densely populated regions of late medieval Europe. Furthermore, the significance of the rhetoricians' annual competitions should not be underestimated, even if we can only speculate on the degree to which both actual plays and the discussion of poetical issues within the 1496 Antwerp landjuweel – the first-known instance of such a rhetoricians' competitionFootnote 149 – could have influenced what was to be staged later that year in Brussels. Highlighting the role of music within a veritable feast of the arts, the pen-and-ink drawings of the Berlin manuscript contribute one more, albeit important, thread to this ‘network’Footnote 150 of previous and present pictorial (and musical) experiences.
