Resemblance and Identification in Personal Devotion: The Images of St. Ursula Commissioned by Anne of Brittany*

Abstract

Abstract: Anne of Brittany commissioned three images of Saint Ursula, and I utilize these to develop a case study to demonstrate that a sense of familiarity with a holy figure was a factor in a worshipper choosing to engage with a particular saint. The iconography of Ursula’s portrayals in the Grandes Heures and Saint Ursula’s Nef reflects a likeness between Anne and the image toward which she directed her piety. I argue that they were commissioned by the queen to help her intensify her initial sense of identification with the saint. Queen Anne, a pious Christian and an educated woman, was familiar with patterns of thinking that enabled comparison and association while reading and contemplating on the vitae of saints. There were three points in Ursula’s vita that might have evoked a sense of kinship with the saint: they were both born in British lands, linked to a royal family, and were faced with marriages to foreign princes. These aspects received significant artistic attention in the portrayals of Ursula under discussion. However, the artists created the images with an interplay between the saint’s likeness to Queen Anne and a slight divergence, an approach that promoted identification with the saint but at the same time could motivate the celebrant to translate the saint’s virtues into her own life. Through an interdisciplinary perspective on the artworks and a survey of the relevant contemporary texts, this study demonstrates that the intimate and internal process of selecting a patron saint and the resulting worship with the aid of images enabled a devotee to negotiate a whole range of aspects linked to his/her self-identity and to promote religiosity and construction of secular aspects of his/her personality.