The Humble Profile of the Regal Chariot in Medieval Miniatures

Abstract

During the prehistoric and ancient periods in Western Europe, chariots furnished an essential part of the glamor surrounding gods and goddesses, kings, and heroes. Only in late Merovingian times did the prestige of ostentatious vehicles begin to fade, and towards the middle of the tenth century carriages no longer appear in our sources. Their use was revived only in the thirteenth century, and then only for great ladies, not for knights. In the intervening centuries artists continued to be commissioned to illustrate ancient texts, such as, for example, the Bible and Prudentius's Psychomachia. Many of these contain references to chariots. Artists might place a ruler in the only vehicles known to them--farm carts or wagons or, if they had access to ancient MSS or monuments, they might copy these. In any case, since illustrators lacked a sense of historical verisimilitude, they saw nothing inappropriate in placing a king in any vehicle which came to hand: a triumphal chariot, a racing car, a harvest wagon, a baggage cart. Pharaoh in the Red Sea appears in a wide variety of chariots, and those of Prudentius's Luxuria run the gamut from the sophisticated type used by high society in Late Antiquity to the jewel-encrusted baggage wagon, to the bedraggled homemade two-wheeler resembling those of the provincial Gallo-Romans. The object of the present paper is to show from what sources illustrators derived their chariots, to what extent these have medieval features, and to describe the phenomenon of the humble profile of the regal chariot from the Carolingian period to the thirteenth century.