II
The Middle Ages inherited most of the classical
accounts of chance images,
but did not respond to all
of the three types discussed above. The
“lucky blot,”
known from Pliny's story of Protogenes,
seems to have
evoked neither repetition nor comment. References to
cloud figures occur as a rhetorical device in theological
writings,
stressing their instability and lack of sub-
stance, as when Anselm of Canterbury (Cur Deus
homo,
ed. F. S. Schmitt, Darmstadt [1960], p. 16) compares
certain fallacious arguments to “figments painted on
clouds” (perhaps indirectly echoing Philostratus);
Michael
Psellus, in a similar vein, says that demons
can change their appearance as easily as the ever-
changing configurations of clouds,
which may resemble
the shape of men, bears, dragons, etc. Albertus
Magnus
seems to have been the only one to attribute material
substance
to cloud figures, although his explanation
differs from that of Lucretius:
exhalations from the
earth, he claims, if aided by heavenly
constellations,
can form in the clouds perfect though lifeless animal
bodies, which may actually drop from the sky (
On
Meteors, III, iii, 23, citing Avicenna).
Elsewhere he also records the chance images inside
blocks of marble,
stressing their miraculous characters;
he even reports that he himself once
saw the head of
a bearded king on the cut surfaces of such a block
that
had just been sawed in two (On Minerals, II,
iii, 1);
all who witnessed the event agreed that Nature had
painted
this image on the stone. Both of these accounts
of “natural
miracles” were given popular currency
toward the end of the
Middle Ages by Franciscus de
Retza, who cited the animal body dropping from
the
sky as well as the head in the marble as arguments
for the
Immaculate Conception in his Defensorium in-
violatae virginitatis Mariae
(ca. 1400). The scenes were
even illustrated in an early printed edition
(Figure 3).
By far the most widespread chance images, however,
were those of the
“agate-of-Pyrrhus” type. The an-
cients' love of gems continued undiminished through-
out the Middle Ages; indeed, these
stones were the
only artistic relics of the pagan past to enjoy
continuous
and unquestioned appreciation. Thousands of them
were incorporated in medieval reliquaries and other
sacred
objects, regardless of their pagan subject matter,
and reports of chance
images recur in treatises on
mineralogy from the lapidary of Marbod of
Rennes to
Ulisse Aldrovandi and Athanasius Kircher. (The ac-
counts of these pierres
imagées have been collected and
analyzed by
Baltrušaitis.) Their effect on artistic prac-
tice, however, is difficult to measure. One
clear-cut
—and so far unique—instance was discovered
by
Ladendorf: the tiny faces hidden among the striations
of the
multicolored marble columns on the canon table
pages of the Gospel Book
from Saint Médard, Soissons(Figure 4).
The artist who painted
these columns in
the early years of Charlemagne's reign may have seen
such faces in early Christian manuscripts, or he could
have
“discovered” them in his own brushwork while
he was
at work. In either case, his intention must have
been to characterize the
material of these columns as
miraculous and uniquely
precious—and hence worthy
to frame the words of the Lord.
A certain propensity toward chance images seems
to have existed throughout
medieval art, even though
the subject is far from fully explored. Thus, in
the
Nativity scene of an early Gothic German Psalter, there
are no
less than three faces on the ground in the imme-
diate vicinity of Saint Joseph (Figure 5). The one far-
thest to the left appears to have been
developed from
a piece of drapery; the other two fill interstices be-
tween clumps of plants. Perhaps the most
plausible
explanation for them is that the artist
“found” (i.e.,
projected) them in the process of copying an older
miniature
whose stylistic conventions he did not fully
understand. His readiness to
interpret unfamiliar details
physiognomically suggests that he knew the
“institu-
tionalized
chance image” of the foliage mask, which
had been revived at
least as early as the twelfth century
and was well-established in the
repertory of Gothic
art (Figure 6). Since these masks sometimes carry in-
scriptions identifying them as images of
pagan nature
spirits or demons, the faces in our Nativity may have
been intended to evoke the sinister forces overcome
by the
Savior.
That Gothic art continued to be receptive to chance
images even in its
final, realistic phase is strikingly
shown by the Hours
of Catherine of Cleves, a Nether-
landish manuscript of ca. 1435-40 distinguished for its
elaborate painted borders. One of these consists of
butterflies, rendered
with painstaking attention to the
colorful patterns of their wings. Among
them is a
butterfly (Figure 7) whose wing pattern resembles a
cavernous human face, like that of a decaying corpse
come back to life.
There can be no question that the
effect is intentional, yet it could
hardly have been
planned from the start; in all likelihood the artist
became aware of it only in the process of painting,
and then chose to
elaborate upon it so that the beholder
could share his experience. What
made him do so, we
may assume, was not only an interest in chance
images
(there is evidence of this on other pages of the same
manuscript) but the role of the butterfly as a symbol
of vanitas, which associated it with death. Despite such
links with
orthodox iconography, there is a strong
element of playfulness in medieval
chance images. The
purest instance of this is a drawing of 1493 by the
young Albrecht Dürer, one side of which shows a
self-portrait, a
sketch of his left hand, and a pillow,
while six more pillows appear on the other side (Figure
8).
Ladendorf was the first to recognize the purpose
of these pillows: a search
for faces hidden among the
folds. Most easily recognizable is the one in
the lower
left-hand corner—a bearded Turk with a huge
turban.
Turning the sheet upside down, we also discover that
the
pillow in the upper left-hand corner contains the
craggy face of a man
wearing a pointed hat. Since these
are the only image-bearing pillows we
know of in the
history of art, Dürer presumably discovered
their
physiognomic potential by accident, perhaps while
sketching a
pillow in preparation of a print or a paint-
ing. What enabled him to play this game, however,
must have been a
familiarity with chance images in
other, more traditional materials such as
stone. He
might indeed have looked upon his pillows as “mal-
leable rocks” from which such
images could be elicited
by manipulation. Yet he seems to have kept his
dis-
covery to himself, so that the
pillow-faces never be-
came
“institutionalized.”
