The Personification Allegory in MS A

By way of a subject guide, the illustration introducing Book VIII in A (Figs. 37 and 37a) offers a charming personification allegory. The miniature occurs five lines from the top of the second column of text and gloss on folio 157. Bracketed between the upper right foliate border pointing to the running title and the initial A , Figure 37 follows the chapter headings. The miniature is composed of three symmetrically disposed standing figures placed within a tricolored quadrilobe spanned by an unbroken crenellated wall segment. Figure 37 does not have the frontispiece status of Figure 24, the illustration of Book V. One of four undivided column illustrations in A , Figure 37 and the illustration of Book II (Fig. 11) are the largest and therefore the most important of the column illustrations.^[11] Another feature of Figure 37 is a departure from the usual red-white-blue color scheme in favor of a distinctive gray-blue-rose palette. Since these more subdued colors are repeated in the next miniature, which introduces Book IX (Fig. 40), this color harmony may signify the continuity of subject matter between Books VIII and IX.^[12]

The configuration of three figures in Figure 37 is unusual as well. The central and largest person is a fashionably coiffed young woman wearing a simple graygreen gown. Her figure lines up with the vertical points of the quadrilobe, the geometric background, and the center of the second column. Although her body is depicted frontally, her head is turned to look at one of two bearded men, who are identically dressed in long rose mantles. Each one turns his head and gestures toward his double. With the other hand, each supports a pink heart. In turn, the female figure extends her disproportionately long arms to embrace the shoulders of the two men. The only inscription in the miniature identifies the woman as Amistié, or Friendship. The position of the inscription at chest level of the personification instead of above her head is unusual. Such a placement may allude to the heart directly below it as the source of the emotions associated with Friendship.

Although Amistié is the sole verbal clue within the miniature, the layout of folio 157 assures the repetition of this key word to guide the reader. In the first column opposite the miniature, the word Amistié occurs in seventeen of the nineteen chapter titles. Chapter 3 is especially important, as the title designates it as the place where the term is defined. Indeed, in the closing gloss of that chapter Oresme explains: "Amistié est benivolence non latente ou manifeste entre pluseurs personnes de l'un a l'autre ou entrechangeable pour aucun bien" (And Friendship is goodwill, which is manifested among people toward one another or given and taken for [mutual] benefit).^[13] When the reader moves to the second column of the folio, rubrics above the miniature make the important point that in Chapter 1 Aristotle demonstrates that Friendship belongs to a discussion of "science morale" (moral science). Directly below the illustration, the first paragraph states the necessity of Friendship to human life. With particular relevance for Oresme's primary reader is the declaration that Friendship is essential for the rich and politically powerful.^[14] Finally, in the second of three glosses on this folio Oresme makes clear

how Aristotle relates Friendship to virtue.^[15] Thus, a variety of introductory verbal information linked to the inscription and miniature on the same folio associates essential concepts with the image.

How does the personification allegory visually express essential aspects of Aristotle's generic definition of Friendship as translated by Oresme? As in the illustrations of Book VII (Figs. 35 and 36), body language is essential in communicating certain points about Amistié. To begin with, the figure's embrace conveys the notion that Friendship depends on reaching beyond the self to someone else. The mutual awareness of Amistié and the two men, conveyed by their turned heads and gazes, indicates their recognition of the bond united by and characteristic of Friendship. Another important element is that the two men support the single rose heart. If in this context the heart symbolizes the soul, the concept expressed may be that the highest type of Friendship symbolizes putting "one soul in two bodies."^[16]

Costume again plays an important role in elucidating significant aspects of the concept. For example, the same rose-colored robes worn by the two men, as well as the resemblance of their facial features, hairstyles, and beards, establish that they are identical twins. This kinship metaphor picks out an essential point in Aristotle's definition of Friendship: the similarities between two individuals and the bonds that bind them are summed up in the saying, "A friend is another self." Since the mantles worn by the friends resemble those worn by Le Continent and Le Vertueus in the illustrations for Book VII (Figs. 35 and 36), the allusion here is to Aristotle's highest type of Friendship. Based on virtue, this kind of Friendship has "qualities [which] are alike in both friends," and men are described as "alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves."^[17] Oresme puts it this way: "Et pour ce dient il un proverbe, que chose semblable aime son semblable et que .i. oysel va a son semblable si comme un estourneau va a un estourneau; et ainsi de quelzconques teles choses" (And for this reason there is a proverb that "like cleaves to like" and that "a bird flocks to its own kind" just as a starling flocks to another starling; and other such things).^[18]

The costume and hairdo of Amistié in Figure 37 are those of a contemporary and fashionable young woman, although her mantle lacks the fur trim of the dress worn by Concupiscence in Figure 35. Thus, Amistié does not share the sexual neutrality of Raison or virtues like Attrempance or Sapience conveyed by their widowlike headdresses (Figs. 16, 33, and 34). Nor does she wear the crown that distinguishes the fashionably clad Vertu in Figure 11. The only sign that Amistié represents an elevated spiritual ideal is her height, a mark of her superiority to the twins. Perhaps the lack of a crown or other mark of Amistié's high status was unintentional. Or Oresme may have wished to distinguish Amistié, who is personified by a feminine, transcendent ideal, from the unnamed masculine "Friends," who operate in a different sphere. Although a triadic ordering scheme appears again, as in Figures 11, 16, and 35, the figures surrounding the woman in the middle here are identical, not antithetical.

The prominent emblem of the heart is an apparently extratextual allusion to the ancient notion that the heart is the seat of the soul, the emotions, or of love.

During the Middle Ages, the heart had both secular and religious connotations.^[19] In trecento art, a flaming heart is the symbol of Caritas in the figure by Giotto in the Arena Chapel and Ambrogio Lorenzetti's altarpiece in Massa Marittima and his Good Government fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.^[20] Furthermore, the secular context of heart symbolism in fourteenth-century French art occurs in a group of ivories, probably made in Paris.^[21] For example, two mirror cases depict the offering of the heart to a lover.^[22] In an illustrated manuscript of the Roman de la rose , the god of love locks up the beloved's heart.^[23]

The heart in Figure 37 operates in a secular context, as the hairstyles and costumes of the three figures imply. Although the illustration of Amistié ingeniously conveys many key notions of Aristotle's concept of Friendship, the reading of the image may have presented difficulties to the contemporary reader. An area of possible confusion is the link between the heart, symbol of heterosexual love, and the two males, who are embraced by the female Amistié. Another complication is the double connotation in French of the word ami , as both sexual partner and friend. Thus, ambiguous gender roles may have occasioned a request for a more explicit visual definition than that of the elegant but cryptic personification allegory of Figure 37.