The King of France and the Queen of Heaven: The Iconography of the Porte Rouge of Notre-Dame of Paris

Abstract

The Porte Rouge (ca. 1270) on the north flank of Notre-Dame in Paris depicts a king and queen kneeling before an image of the Coronation of the Virgin. These figures have traditionally been identified as donor portraits of Louis IX and his wife Marguerite of Provence. The royal pair never were patrons of the cathedral, however, preferring friars and monks to the secular church in their endowments and shunning a long tradition of Capetian support of Notre-Dame. Suffering from the resulting loss of prestige, the cathedral canons sought to appropriate the image of royal authority within their own ecclesiology and depicted the king in supplication to the Virgin Mary, whose image symbolized the church. In 1270 the kneeling praying figures we have come to identify as donor figures did not convey financial patronage of specific works of art, but rather spiritual supplication and entreaty. By showing the king and queen in a ritual gesture of supplication to Maria-Ecclesia, the portal expressed the church's ideal of the king subordinate and supplicant to the triumphant cathedral. Furthermore, in the image of the king the portal denies any likeness to the figure of Christ, rejecting the contemporary, but competing ideal articulated by the crown during Louis's reign of a sacral and christological kingship independent of the church. Rather than simply representing a reductive coronation iconography, the Porte Rouge offers a bold and deft statement of ecclesiastical authority and ideology of the second half of the thirteenth century.