Foxlily

Here is another painting I don’t own but wish I did, though I’m not sure where I’d hang an 8′ x 10′ canvas, even assuming I won the lottery and could afford it.

While in New York a few days ago, my daughter Hadley paused to have this photograph snapped in front of Joan of Arc, by Jules Bastien LePage (1848-1884), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

French realism wouldn’t ordinarily be on her agenda for a gallery visit;  she prefers abstract work, but she remembered the small print of this painting that has hung in my office for many years.

I’ve always thought the painting showed St. Joan at a transitional moment.  She has knocked over her seat, turned her back on the comfortable stone cottage with its garden of old trees, and is looking into a larger world, or vision, that only she can see. Behind her are the sources of the voices Joan claimed inspired her. I love the look in her clear blue eyes.

The Archangel Michael hovers in his golden armor, sword upraised.  Beside him is St. Margaret of Antioch, one of the Virgin Martyrs of the early church. Tortured to death in 304 A.D., St. Margaret is patron of women falsely accused.  Beside St. Margaret is St. Catherine of Alexandria, with her head in her hands, in an expression of apparent despair.  Catherine, an early prodigy and convert, disputed with learned philosophers at a young age.  Another Virgin Martyr, Catherine was executed on a spiked wheel, now called a “Catherine Wheel.”

How predictive the fates and qualities of these three “guides” were, given the course of Joan’s short and difficult life. Was she the victim of ventriloquism employed in a cruel political plot?  Was she schizophrenic?  Did she accidentally ingest environmental toxins that caused her to hear voices?  What, or who, were the voices?  A mystery.

Artist LePage, who died at 36, was only 31 when he made this painting in 1879. His subject had been 19 when she was burned at the stake in the town square of Rouen, for heresy, witchcraft, and idolatry, after enduring imprisonment and persecution by a tribunal intent upon destroying her. Among her alleged crimes: wearing men’s clothes, in violation of Deuteronomy 22:5 (a chapter that also requires householders to build battlements on their rooftops–a rule I suspect few of Joan’s inquisitors had followed).

Joan was declared innocent of all charges at a new trial in 1456, when she’d been dead for 25 years.  She was canonized in 1920, when France was still reeling from World War I and needed a national icon.

I keep the print in my office as a reminder of the price of naivete; of how fortunes can change, how everything turns on a dime, and how views that can get a person killed in one era can lift her to sainthood in another.

Acclaimed author Mary Gordon has written a fine slim biography of Joan, called Joan of Arc:  A Life. It’s part of the excellent “Penguin Lives” series, which also includes biographies of Crazy Horse, by Larry McMurtry; Robert E. Lee, by Roy Blount; and Leonardo da Vinci, by Sherwin Nuland.

Another of Joan of Arc’s biographers was Mark Twain:  Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Twain invents a fictional frame story, in which Joan recounts her life to a nun, who in old age reveals what she was told.  Twain also wrote an essay about Joan (Joan of Arc:  An Essay), in which he said of Joan, “she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” Rare, straight-out praise from the often cynical Twain. I don’t know if he ever saw the LePage painting, though it’s doubtful he did, considering the logistics.  As an obvious adorer of the brave girl who led an army, defended the authenticity of her aptly prescient “voices” to the end, and signed her name simply “Jehanne,”  Twain might have loved this imagined likeness, as so many others have.

Thank you, Hadley, for remembering.  Do you remember our visit here?