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The Artistic Achievements of Matthew Paris in his Self-Portrait with Virgin and Child
Julia Herni
Creaties van de Hemel
1158 words
17 January 2022
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The Artistic Achievements of Matthew Paris in his Self-Portrait with Virgin and Child
Illuminated manuscripts and its medieval tales have captured the eye of art historians
for decades now. A leading figure in the British, medieval world of historiography is the
thirteenth-century Benedictine monk Matthew Paris.1 He is believed to have been active
in the years from c. 1240 until 1259.2 He had acquired his writing skills in the
monastery of St Albans, located in present-day England.3 Matthew’s creative
accomplishments in drawings are often overshadowed by his success in history writing.
Yet, Matthew was also an artist, a theologist, a cartographer, a chronicler, and a
scholar.4 When Matthew’s drawings are the centre of attention in research, it is often his
Chronica Majora that is taken as the case study.5 Despite this, Richard Vaughan, an
important scholar in the field of Matthew Paris, opens his monography with a unique
full-page miniature from Matthew’s Historia Anglorum, featuring what is assumed to be
Matthew’s self-portrait.6
Within a simple, geometrically designed frame, Mary is sitting on a backless
throne or a pedestal. She holds her Child and embraces it with her green cloak. Under
the frame, there is a monk kneeling while his hands lead the viewer’s eyes towards a
prayer in Latin. The stubbled chin of this monk as well as his pose have been observed
in other manuscript drawings of submissive monks, of which one can be found in
Bede’s Commentary on the Apocalypse.7 Bede’s work would surely have been available
to Matthew considering the respectably-sized library of St Albans.8 It was produced
between c. 1250 and 1259.9 Within a range of other miniatures by Matthew Paris and
themes in his work, this portrait has been evaluated and interpreted during the twentieth
and twenty-first century.
Before Matthew’s self-portrait was claimed to be his, it was the question
whether Matthew was an artist at all. Sir Frederic Madden was the first to argue that
1
Björn Weiler, “Matthew Paris on the Writing of History,” Journal of Medieval History 35(2012)3: 254.
2
Ibid.
3
Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1.
4
Matthaeus Parisiensis, Historia Anglorum, trans. Frederic Madden (London: Longmans, Green, Reader
and Dyer, 1866), xi.; Miriam Marshall, “Thirteenth-Century Culture as Illustrated by Matthew Paris,”
Speculum 14, no. 4 (October 1939): 477.
5
Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987).
6
Figure 1.; Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris.
7
Judith Collard, “Matthew Paris’s ‘Self-Portrait,” 163.
8
Matthaeus Parisiensis, Historia Anglorum, xxiii.
9
Figure 1.; Judith Collard, “Matthew Paris’s ‘Self-Portrait,” 152.
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some of the illustrations in Matthew’s historical manuscripts were created by its author.
He states that Matthew’s artistic skills were exhibited in, for example, a portrait of an
English friar named William.10 The idea of Matthew as an illustrator has since then been
extensively researched. Sir Thomas Duffy Hardy resisted some of Madden’s theory,
explaining how the miniatures could have been made by more people of which one was
Matthew.11 Hardy’s idea was endorsed by Margaret Rickert’s analysis of Matthew’s
portrait with the Virgin, concluding that only two drawings in the Chronica Majora
were produced by Matthew.12 M. R. James questioned Madden’s claims as well.13 It was
Richard Vaughan’s monography from 1958 that had settled the dispute. Since then, art
historians have generally accepted Matthew as an illustrator and artist.14 Vaughan stated
that Matthew had drawn almost all illustrations in the Chronica Majora and other
chronicles.15 He had supported his arguments unlike any other scholar before him,
namely with palaeographical evidence.16 Allegra Lafrate, Cynthia Hahn, Martin
Kauffmann, and Suzanne Lewis are just a few who have continued Vaughan’s work.17
Discussion has not entirely died out though. Nigel Morgan argues that it is not reliable
to assume Matthew Paris’s authorship and illustration of The Life of St. Alban, which
Vaughan had done in his research, since its placement in history may be wrong.18
James could only be sure of one thing, which is that the miniature of the Virgin
and the Child was produced by Matthew himself.19 Despite this statement, Vaughan
believed that there were no illustrations of significance in the Historia Anglorum, saying
10
Matthaeus Parisiensis, Historia Anglorum, xlix.; Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 205.
11
Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 205.
12
Figure 1.; Margaret Rickert, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 1965),
119-20.; Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris, 16.
13
M. R. James, “The Drawings of Matthew Paris,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 14(1925-1926):
18.
14
Nigel Morgan, “Matthew Paris, St Albans, London, and the Leaves of the 'Life of St Thomas Becket',”
The Burlington Magazine 130(1988)1019: 88.
15
Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 219-20.
16
Ibid. 212-3.
17
Allegra Lafrate, “Of Stars and Men: Matthew Paris and the Illustrations of MS Ashmole 30.” Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76(2013).; Cynthia Hahn, “The End of the Monastic Tradition
and a New Beginning: Matthew Paris,” in Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of
Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).;
Martin Kauffmann, “Seeing and Reading the Matthew Paris Saints’ Lives,” in Illuminating the Middle
Ages: Tributes to Prof. John Lowden from his Students, Friends and Colleagues, ed. Laura Cleaver, Alixe
Bovey and Lucy Donkin (Leiden: Brill, 2020).; Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris.
18
Nigel Morgan, “Matthew Paris, St Albans, London.”
19
M. R. James, “The Drawings of Matthew Paris,” 18.
