The Domesticity of Sacred Space in the Fifteenth-Century Netherlands

Abstract

When we think of ‘sacred space’ in the late medieval/early modern period, we tend to imagine a place – whether an entire building, a room within a building, or a section of a room – marked out by its layout and furnishings as intended for religious purposes. Within domestic households, sacred space might consist of a private chapel or oratory, or a small shrine area where devotional images and other religious paraphernalia were grouped together. Most castles or palaces included their own chapel served by household chaplains, often with adjacent oratories (non-consecrated religious spaces) where the owners could watch Masses in private, for example in the Burgundian ducal palaces of Rihour in Lille, whose chapel and adjacent oratory are the only parts of the complex still standing, and Germolles in Burgundy, where the ruins of the chapel and great hall stand adjacent to the surviving residential building.1 Such domestic religious spaces were not reserved to the nobility or extremely wealthy alone: although chapels, whose consecration required ecclesiastical permission, were a sign of prestige, individuals in more modest households might use a section of another room for private devotions. Compared with palatine chapels, however, there is comparatively little evidence about exactly how such domestic spaces were utilized for sacred purposes. Many small religious objects (whose size implies that they were used privately by individuals rather than as a focus of collective worship) survive from this period, including prints, single panels, statuettes, and small diptychs and triptychs, usually portraying saints or emotionally-charged scenes relating to 1 O. Canneva-Tetu et al., Le Palais Rihour et ses vitraux (Lille, 1999), pp. 1, 12-15; P.Beck (ed.), Vie de cour en Bourgogne a la fin du Moyen Age (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, 2002), pp. 5766; Art from the Court of Burgundy: the Patronage of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, 1364-1419 (Paris, 2004), pp. 137-41. Although few Burgundian examples survive, we can better understand their architectural structure by studying their FrenchChrist’s infancy and passion. The wide range of artistic quality and material prestige of such objects suggests that a broad cross-section of society used them, and while many would have been owned by nuns and other religious, others were commissioned and used by the laity.2 In this paper I will examine a few such images that were painted on panel, which became a popular independent medium in the fifteenth-century Netherlands, in order to explore what they reveal about private devotional experience and the spaces in which it could occur. In particular, I will focus on the rise in the fifteenth-century Netherlands of a new visual iconography, that of the Virgin in a fully-developed domestic interior, which appeared in many small devotional works as well as in some larger altarpieces and in illuminated manuscripts. These images help us understand the spaces of private devotion in part because they sometimes include representations of private devotional objects; but more fundamentally, this iconography gives us insight into the potential ‘sacredness’ of domestic spaces by choosing to place the Virgin within the home rather than in the church, pointing towards an underlying attitude that the sacred might easily and appropriately enter into the secular domestic world. This paper will suggest that these scenes of the Madonna reading, praying, or sitting with the Christ Child in a bedroom or sitting room responded to the practices of those who owned such works: people who, while not rejecting the church and its fixed sacred spaces, did not see them as the only place for religious experience.