Contrition and Fear of God Return a Purified Heart to Soul, detail
Barthélemy d'Eyck
1455
colored ink on vellum
9 x 9.5 cm.
credit: Bibliothèques, Médiathèques de Metz

AN EVIL HEART

This tableau is the last of nine miniatures in the 15th century illustrated manuscript Le Mortifiement of vaine plaisance (The Mortification of Vain Pleasure). The Narrator describes the action:

And when she [Soul, kneeling] saw the two ladies [Fear of God in beige and Contrition in white, “naked to her loins”]…standing in front of her, holding the cross by its crossbar, and when she saw that her evil heart, which sinned so much, was tightly joined and nailed on the cross, bleeding all over from the wounds it had received…she opened her mouth…saying loudly: “What is this that you have brought me, stretched here on this cross, bleeding thus, dejected and beaten, bare and quiet. Is it my heart?”

This allegory, told in 2,666 lines of vernacular Francien French authored in 1455 by René d'Anjou, opens with Soul lamenting her “misdirected and undisciplined heart", leading her to vain pleasures and exposing her to eternal damnation. Hearing her cries, Fear of God and Contrition appear and urge her to repent. Fear of God instructs her with three parables to guide Soul’s heart to the pure love of the Creator through the Passion of Jesus.

Fear of God and Contrition depart, taking Soul’s heart with them. They enter a garden paradise where they encounter four ladies—Faith, Hope, Love, and Divine Grace. Faith with a spike of iron, Hope with a spike of silver, and Love with a golden spike nail Soul’s heart to the shaft of a cross. Divine Grace with a blade lances the right side of her heart. Variously colored blood of excessive indulgence, fleshly corruption, impatience, negligence, envy, presumption, and lastly vain pleasure spills from Soul’s heart. After her heart is physically purged of sin, Soul is saved from the fires of hell.

To our modern sensibilities with which we experience the world evolving over time as a result of cause and effect, Medieval allegories seem static and naïve. For a European in the Middle Ages, living on a stationary Earth at the center of a universe in which all phenomena were linked in a fixed scalæ natura, an abstract idea would automatically be transposed into a corresponding symbolic person or object to illustrate a moral lesson.

René d'Anjou (1409–1480) claimed numerous titles including René I of Naples and King of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, he was not a particularly adept politician or military campaigner and was forced to relinquish dominion over all his various legacies. In 1471 he retired to Anjou, France where he became the legendary patron of arts and letters Le bon roi René (the Good King René). René is alleged to have been the ninth Grand Master of the Priory of Sion conspiracy hoax featured in the DaVinci Code.

Barthélemy d'Eyck (ca. 1420–1470), the miniaturist, was one of the leading painters in René’s retinue at Anjou and responsible for parts of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry calendar.

Soul’s heart, speared and spiked, is reminiscent of the Five Wounds and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

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