Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Nine

This image is the underdrawing, sinopia, for the fresco that I selected for an image of Cleofe  Malatesta Palaiologina.  I selected the fresco in part because it is of the right date, in part because it is on a wall of her sister's palace in Mantua, in part because it shares features with portraits of other members of the family.  I also selected it because it seemed to illustrate Bessarion's description that she knew she was beautiful, but that she didn't take particular care about it, and Pepagomenos' statement that she didn't pay much attention to what she was wearing.

Paola Malatesta Gonzaga and her husband Gianfrancesco had hired the young artist Pisanello to fresco the four walls of the great hall of the palace with an Arthurian tournament.  This is a map of the walls of the great hall with indications of the surviving frescos.  

The sinopie have been removed and are on exhibit in another room: there are surviving parts of the sinopie that have not survived in the frescos, and vice versa.  The fresco/sinopia of my interest is from Wall 2, at the right-hand end.  This is what survives of the fresco, and you can compare it with the image at the beginning. 

The frescos have been dated anywhere from 1425 to 1457, and each art historian can give good reasons for the chosen dates. Joanna Marsden-Woods, whose work on the frescos I have found most useful, prefers 1443-1444. I have my own preferred dates. JM-W also gives the Arthurian story behind these frescos, which concerns an important tournament.  The lady in question is under a canopy to the left of the image below. Indistinctly, there are some of the tournament figures to the right, on Wall 1.  If you compare the heads of the figures with the bricks in the wall at the bottom, you will begin to get an idea of how small and dense the figures are.

And Wall 1 more distinctly here:

The tournament was given by a King Brangoire. The daughter of King Brangoire -- nameless in the story -- seduced Bohort, one of the three knights who accomplished the quest for the Holy Grail, at a tournament at her father's court, and by him had a son, Helain, who would become Emperor of Constantinople. Marsden-Woods does not explain what significance this story might have had for the Gonzagas of Mantua, or for her date of 1443-1444.  My date is 1428-1429, a good 15 years earlier.

But consider:  in February 1428, Cleofe -- after six years of a marriage in which her husband had refused a sexual relationship -- had  given birth to a daughter, Helena, the heir to the throne of Constantinople. None of the five living sons of Manuel II would father a son for twenty years. Might not Paola Malatesta Gonzaga enjoy having this painted reminder that she was the aunt of the possible future ruler of Constantinople?  The co-incidence of names -- Helain and Helena (Eleni) -- surely cannot be accidental.

I would like to see another element of the story as significant: Marsden-Woods says: "The love affair between Bohort and the princess, with its glorification of sexual passion, implied that a union between princes in real life could involve mutual passion and love." The sexual implication in the fresco is striking. If this Arthurian imagery effectively represented Cleofe's family's view of the sexual relationship, it is in fine apposition to the view of George Gemistos Plethon.

This is the sinopia with ladies of many and wondrous hair styles watching the tournament.  I cannot say if the nameless princess is one of the ladies in the lower tier, or the upper.  I cannot say if the fresco was intended to portray Cleofe.  I cannot say if Pisanello ever saw her, though dates and routes of his various travels would have given him several opportunities.  I can say that I do most intensely hope so.

Some material and the black-&-white images are taken from Joanna Marsden-Woods' book,  The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello’s Arthurian Frescoes (1998). The color images are from Luke Syson & Dillon Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (2001).  

Bonus picture: Compare the sinopia drawing of the lady's wreath with the hat worn by Camilla Parker Bowles on her wedding day to Prince Charles who is quite knowledgeable about art.

Previous entries about Cleofe:  

Pavane for a Dead Princess, I
Pavane for a Dead Princess, II
Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V 
Pavane for a Dead Princess, VI

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VII

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VIII

Her Most Dear Daughter, Helena
Glory Days
Theodoros' Poem to Cleofe 
Theodoros II Palaiologos  
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti 

Bessarion to Theodoros, I
Bessarion to Theodoros, II

Scholarios talks about Theodoros 

On Vacation: Hoopoe

In this entry, the hoopoe with the lovely gawkiness of a young teenage girl: a 17th-century Turkish plate, the hoopoe that was my neighbor in Athens, and an early 15th-century drawing by Pisanello.

The Empress and her Riding Hat

On 17 December 1432, Bertrandon de Broquière went to Ag. Sophia for the service of the Three Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace but he spent the service watching John VIII with his mother Helena, his wife Maria, and his brother Thomas, Despot of the Morea. Actually, Bertrandon wasn't interested in anyone but Maria, a "tresbelle dame." He thought she was a honey.

Five years later, Pero Tafur was invited several times to go hunting with John and Maria several times. He left a brief description:

The Empress rides astride, with two stirrups, and when she desires to mount, two lords hold up a rich cloth, raising their hands aloft and turning their backs upon her, so that when she throws her leg across the saddle no part of her person can be seen.

Although Pero Tafur had other, conversational, encounters with Maria, that is the most he does in the way of description. Compare it with Bertrandon's account. He was clearly hoping to see her legs:

I went all day without food and drink, almost to vespers, very late, to see the Empress who had rested in a residence nearby which seemed to me as beautiful as a church, to see her come out and how she mounted the horse. She only had with her two woman and two or three elderly men, and three of the kind of people the Turks have to guard their women. When she came out of the residence someone brought a bench from which she could mount and then they brought out a very beautiful roncey draped with rich and beautiful bardings. Going beside the bench, one of the elderly notables took a long mantle which she carried and then went to the other side of the horse and raised up the mantel with his hands as high as he could. She put a foot in the stirrup and then mounted the horse like a man, and then he threw the mantel on her shoulders.

There are several elements in this narrative that raise questions, such as why wasn't there a more private place where she could do this, but it is difficult to find information with which to approach the questions. The other thing thing Bertrandon mentioned is that she wore one of those long pointed Greek hats

on the point of which she had three golden plumes which suited her very well. She seemed as beautiful to me as she had before. She came so close to me that someone said I should follow behind, and it seems there is nothing to say, except that her face was made-up, which was not necessary because she was young and fair. One her ears, hanging from each one, was a large flat earring with many stones, more rubies than anything else. It appeared, when the Empress mounted her horse, that the two women with her were equally beautiful, and they wore mantles and hats.**

So riding astride, the Empress and her two women rode the length of the city of Constantinople, from Agia Sophia to the Blachernae Palace up a steep hill overlooking the Golden Horn, in the December dark. Accounts in this period offer intriguing glimpses of a combination of formality and informality among the royals. Take Pero Tafur again:

At the entrance to the Palace . . . is an open loggia of marble with stone benches round it, and stones, like tables, raised on pillars in front of them, placed end to end. Here are many books and ancient writings and histories, and on one side are gaming boards so that the Emperor's house may always be well supplied. Inside, the house is badly kept, except certain parts where the Emperor, the Empress, and attendants can live, although cramped for space.

A little more can be said about that hat, but only a little. Extensive hat-searching turned up three images of pointed Greek hats. This first is from an early 15th-century Italian painting which I have not been able to identify, but it is surely based on an impression of Manuel II when he was in Italy and Paris between 1399 and 1402.

Artists were fascinated by Manuel and his hats, the way the Italians were fascinated by John and his hats five years after Bertrandon saw the hat with golden feathers. They took up Manuel's beard and curled hair and imperial outfits with great enthusiasm, using him to portray ancient philosophers and wise men and one of the Three Kings.

There is another pointed hat, found in the Très Belles Heures, in another image of Manuel, when he was visiting in Paris. Only one other pointed Greek hat has turned up for me, painted by Carpaccio more than eighty years later in St. Stephen Preaching at Jerusalem, but no one would wear it with golden feathers and ruby earrings. I am seeing Maria's hat as being made of elaborate fabric like that of the philosopher-king, but of the style of the Belles Heures which seems much more suited for riding.

I have already used the picture of the lady above to represent Maria. It is by Pisanello, and appears to be the same lady as the Princess in his fresco of St. George and the Princess of Trebizond. She, too, is young and fair, almost as if seen in a dream, and does not look at all like young women in Italian paintings. Pisanello drew, modeled, and painted John extensively, and I like to think John had a portrait of Maria with him.

[Later comment:  I do not think this is a portrait of Maria, although an Italian art historian does.  I am much more inclined to think it based on women of the Malatesta-Gonzaga family and originally intended as a portrait of Cleofe Palaiologina. See here and here for partial thoughts on this.  I have not yet published my reasons for this, as I am still in the process of gathering evidence for AND against.]


** Go here for a little more on Maria's wardrobe.

Dear John

John VIII Palaiologos was a man in frequent crippling pain. He was an oldest son who constantly tried to do the right thing which was never adequate, and who lived a life of unremitting stress for which there were no solutions. His first two marriages were no marriages at all, and his third marriage ended by breaking his heart. He is about forty-six in the portrait to the left.

He was twenty-one at the first marriage in 1414 which was political--someone in his position would have expected nothing else--and the bride was a child, Anna of Russia. Constantinople sent a glorious vestment to the Metropolitan of Moscow with pearl portraits of the couple to celebrate the event. The marriage is not likely to have much affected his life. Anna lived in the women's apartments of the palace, and John served as regent while his father, Manuel, was out of the country. In 1416, when Manuel came home, John left for the Morea, and not until he arrived home in 1418 did he learn that Anna had died of the Eighth Death the previous August.

His second marriage was one of a.brace of marriages arranged on one side by the Pope, Martin V, as part of his project to unite the Eastern and Western churches, and on the other by Manuel II as part of his efforts to get military and financial aid for the battered empire. The brides arrived in November 1420 with large endowments Cleofe's story has already been told here. Sophia of Montferrat was quite young, already widowed, distantly related to the Palaiologues. She had blonde braids down to her feet, an ample bosom, a slender neck. They were married at Agia Sophia in January 1419, he was crowned co-emperor, she was crowned the next day, and he never spoke to her again. He couldn't bear her.

The accounts are most unclear about what was wrong. A writer who knew the family said that she was well-mannered, but that John disliked her, and then came to hate her because of his dislike--thie sequence is understandable. But his unkindness, taken together with the fact that his brother Theodoros was simultaneously hostile to the lovely bride chosen for him, suggests problems within the Palaiologos family left unaddressed by contemporary chroniclers and modern historians. It is perhaps not the place to comment that their father, Manuel II, had written a treatise against marriage (except for dynastic reasons) shortly after his own, late, marriage, and that he had kept the manuscript circulating in the palace all those years.

One writer says her face was distorted, and that she was tall. From that, a modern "historian" meanly pronounces Sophia "una gigantessa dalla faccia de gorgone," and claims that she was confined in the palace. Evidence suggests that neither statement was true. Constantinopolitan wits were saying it was a case of "Easter behind, Lent before." My own thought is that however unfortunate her face, she was also larger than John who was, as the portrait above suggests, physically slight. He was very very conscious of appearances. A religious chronicler said:

This man was crowned with his wife whom they had brought for him with many riches. He accepted her but he did not love her at all. . . . The emperor was extremely addicted to pleasures of the flesh and, for this reason, he had no affection for her.

Another chronicle repeats this. They are monastic chronicles and can be expected to scowl, but they are nearly the only hints we get that John had any life at all that was not being fed into the maw of the state. A secular chronicle mentions one charming interlude, a possibly unwise interlude because a small military action was at stake, shortly before the Sophia marriage:

The Byzantine emperor was at Proikonēsos, at leisure with his lover who happened to be the daughter of a priest, and so he was not there when he was needed.

This is the only time during his father's lifetime that John is reported to have done something he enjoyed. One ventures to hope that this was not the only such interval. Sophia herself lived quietly in the palace with the household staff she had brought from home. John, out of obedience to his father, did not try to end the marriage. But the year after Manuel died, a year after John became emperor in his own right, some time in 1426, Sophia and a few Italian-speaking attendants went for a walk in a garden along the shore. A Genoese boat drew abreast, they boarded, the boat sailed. Somehow no one minded, and Sophia was returned to Montferrat where she lived out her small life in a convent until her death in 1434. It is said that only thing she took with her from Constantinople was the crown with which she had been crowned Empress of the Romans. But the Orthodox used crowns for weddings, and perhaps it was the crown of her marriage.

There was a third marriage for John the next year, his own decision, to the princess Maria of Trebizond. The young Bessarion, who was from Trebizond and related to her, and who appreciated womanly attractions, made the arrangements. If this painting above by Pisanello (who knew both Bessarion and John--and who might have seen a portrait of her), if this small and memorably lovely woman is actually intended to be Maria, we have a sense of the woman they might have seen. John apparently fell completely in love with her, and she with him. What fragmentary reports we have of their marriage shows her riding with him on hunts--wearing masses of rubies and other jewels, taking care of his guests, and sending letters to him when he was away.

While he was away having the worst experience of his life in Ferrara-Florence, trying to save the empire, when the picture above was painted, Maria and Zoe, wife of John's brother Demetrios, both contracted plague. Someone in the palace wrote to someone in Florence saying that the women were ill, but it was decided not to tell the brothers, because John would get upset and take to his bed and things would drag out even longer. Some of the delegation learned, as they were struggling to sail home against the winter storms, that Maria had died of the Tenth Death, on 17 December, but it was decided again to keep the information from John because he was a bad sailor at the best of times, and with this he would insist on going ashore indefinitely..

When the brothers arrived back in Constantinople on the first of February, they were met at the dock by a large and sober group from the palace led by their brother Constantine. Someone confided to Demetrios that Maria had died, but not to tell John. Someone else confided to John that Zoe had died, but not to tell Demetrios. The party walked in silence up to the palace, each brother stoically grieving for the other, to be met by their mother, Helena, who took them to her suite and told them that they were both widowers.

John buried Maria in the family church of the Pantokrator and collapsed into depression. When he himself died nine years later, the unforgiving Othodox clergy denied him funeral rites because of his support for Church Union, but his family buried him in Maria's grave.