The Archduchess and the Parrot

Abstract

Everyone who works on medieval theatre knows of the painting popularly called ‘The Triumph of Isabella’. It is one of the few pieces of evidence about what a medieval English pageant wagon might have looked like. Fewer know that it is not English at all, but Belgian, and not precisely medieval (though possibly quite archaic) but High Renaissance, rising Baroque. It is one of a sequence of paintings of an annual procession or ommegang in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, more precisely of Our Lady of the Sablon in Brussels, executed between 1615 and 1616 by the court painter Denis van Alsloot.1 It is a formalized panoramic painting, showing the procession winding its way up and down an open space (as yet unidentified)2 in the centre of early seventeenth-century Brussels. It currently reposes in the Theatre Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London. Its companion picture, now in the Department of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the V&A, shows the Shooters’ Guilds marching in the same procession, albeit in two halves, thanks to an early nineteenth-century owner who, finding it did not fit his wall space properly, not only sliced it in half but even removed the outside edges.3 Fortunately there is a copy in the Broodhuis/Maison du Roi Museum in the Grand’ Place in Brussels,4 which shows us what has gone: it included a very fine mobile Hellmouth.KeywordsPatron SaintExotic BirdRotary ClubBizarre ItemMedieval TheatreThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.