Venus and Christ in Chaucer's Complaint of Mars: The Fairfax 16 Frontispiece

Abstract

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 contains one of the most accomplished illuminations to be associated with any of Chaucer’s works. The full-page illustration preceding the Complaint of Mars (fol. 14v; fig. 1) rivals in skill even the much-discussed Troilus frontispiece (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61, fol. 1v), but Chaucer criticism has generally ignored the Fairfax picture.1 This is so in part, of course, because the Complaint of Mars has held less intrinsic interest than Troilus and Criseyde, even though the two poems are so similar in theme that the Complaint has been called a ‘‘miniature Troilus.’’2 It is also— perhaps more—because the Fairfax image has been deemed unreadable in terms of the poem it accompanies. It has seemed all too clear, as Julia Boffey explains it, that the image derives from artistic precedents completely unconnected with Chaucer’s work, and that it exists only because ‘‘a convenient iconographic tradition associated with the story