An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (review)

Abstract

An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum. By Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Vol. 10.] (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press. 2014. Pp. viii, 238. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-916-10179-4.)The Canticum canticorum, a blockbook produced in the Netherlands around 1465-70, is a series (or Suite, as the author calls it) of eight double-page woodcuts comprising four individual pictures each, arranged in two registers per page. The woodcuts depict Christ; a crowned and haloed young woman (Mary); and various bystanders, mostly a group of three virgins (the daughters of Sion). The pictures contain banderoles with (xylographie) texts, taken from the Latin text of the Canticles but arranged in different from the Vulgate. By being inserted in banderoles, the texts are turned into a dialogue between the persons depicted, with the pictures serving as a aid to understand and to meditate on the text. Although the sequence of the pages varies in some of the approximately thirty surviving copies, they are here reproduced in the order accepted by the author as original (p. 222). Each of the eight double-page spreads is presented first in a reproduction from the (uncolored) copy held by the Pierpont Morgan Librar)' in New York; subsequently, each of the four pictures is analyzed individually in minute detail, beginning with a reproduction from a 1949 facsimile, a description, an iconographie study of visual parallels (p. 16), transcriptions and translations of the Latin inscriptions, interpretations of the verses by modern and medieval authors (Marvin Pope, Giles of Rome, Nicholas of Lyra, Denys the Carthusian), and a brief summary (analysis). The book thus allows the reader to immerse her- or himself deeply into the fifteenth-century blockbook. It is very attractively designed, with more than 200 color reproductions of works of art that can in some way be compared with the (highly unusual) iconography of the blockbook. Rather than putting the blockbook solely in the context of medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Canticles, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin draws on copious material from other forms of art-mainly Italian paintings and frescoes. This method, of course, raises questions as to whether direct influences between such different works of art, which originated in different regions, are possible; but instead of studying antecedents, Lavin intends to make the reader familiar with a widespread iconographie repertoire that allowed fifteenth-century users to understand and contextualize the blockbook. …