An English “Adoration”
Art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was far more closely connected with the church than it is to-day. The most beautiful buildings were those of the church, and the art of painting was soon called upon for their decoration. Books at that time were rare and costly, and the stories of the saints whose “holydays” were times of festivity for the people, were mostly handed down by word of mouth, and often with a good deal of confusion of times and people. And naturally, when the rich men of 1300 called in a workman to decorate a church or to paint a panel which could be moved from one building to another, they liked to see on their walls pictures of their favorite saints and heroes, pictures which reminded them of the stories they could not read. It made no difference to them if saint and hero and king lived hundreds of years apart.
There is one such picture, one of the oldest in England, so old that no one knows who painted it, which is interesting because it is so easy to see that the king who ordered it painted was thinking of the old Christmas story of the Adoration of the Magi, who were always thought of in the Middle Ages as being kings. The picture is painted on two wooden panels, joined with hinges so that it can be closed, and is in bright colors against a background of gold.
The English king who probably ordered it to celebrate his coronation was Richard II. of England, son of the famous Black Prince. One likes to think that although he thought of himself as one of a long line of kings ruling by divine right, whom it was natural to see surrounded by persons royal and divine, yet he wished to be painted not in the act of receiving but of giving homage. After all, in spite of the king’s crown and the robe of state, too big for a child’s figure, he was only a boy barely eleven, and whatever he became later here he is shown offering his kingdom to the Holy Child in His Mother’s arms.
There was a special reason for Richard’s having his picture resemble pictures of the Adoration of the Magi for the Day of the Kings, January 6, was not only his own birthday, but also the day upon which he was crowned. And an account of his coronation tells us that after the ceremony he made an offering at the Shrine of Our Lady at Pewe, nearby, of “eleven angels,” one for each year of his young life. Exactly what these eleven angels were no one now knows; they may have been gold coins with an angel stamped upon them, or they may have been small images. But perhaps he remembered his eleven years and this offering when he told the painter to surround Mother Mary with the eleven angels in sapphire blue whom you see in the picture. One sees at least that they are his angels, for each wears his special badge, the Jewel of the White Hart, and the Collar of Broom-pods. Almost all the Magi pictures represent one of the kings as kneeling, with the two others standing behind him, and one can imagine Richard boyishly choosing the other two kings. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey, so it is natural enough that one of them should be Edward the Confessor who founded the Abbey; the other, holding an arrow, is St. Edmund, an early king of England who is said to have been shot to death with arrows by the Danes, because he refused to abandon Christianity. Joseph, too, is a customary figure in paintings of the Adoration, but cannot you hear the boy king saying, “No, I do not want St. Joseph; my father died in midsummer so I really became king about the time of St. John’s Day, if I am crowned at Epiphany; so I will have St. John with a lamb and Edward the Confessor; and Edward shall hold a ring?” There is a pretty story that St. John the Evangelist, wandering in the disguise of a beggar, asked alms of King Edward the Confessor; and, that the king, rather than refuse a poor man, gave him a ring from his finger, because he had no money with him. And it would be so like a boy not to care that the two St. Johns were not at all the same. That which mattered is that one of the angels was holding toward the Holy Child’s reaching hands the banner of England as the gift of the kneeling boy.
