The knight’s fall: personification of Pride in Southern French hagiography and iconography of the 11th — early 12th centuries

Abstract

The paper explores the dismounted knight as the personification of Pride in the context of Southern French art and hagiography of the 11th–12th centuries. This motif is based on the Psychomachia, the Late Antique allegorical poem by a 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius that visualizes a series of combats between Virtues and Vice. The key point in the sequence is the battle between Humility and mounted Pride culminating in the fall of the latter into the pit. The metaphor of Pride brought low literally visualized as the fall of a proud she-warrior from her steed resonates in the literature of the 11th–12th century. In the society where the image of an armed horseman is strongly associated with a member of the secular elite, the classical motif acquires a new social dimension. The Southern French hagiography of the 11th – early 12th century adapts it to the stories of punishment and derision of violent knights. Since the late 11th century allegorical figures of Virtues and Vices pass from the manuscript pages of illuminated treatises to the sculpted and painted decor of Romanesque churches. The Prudentius’ armed and armored she-warriors grow progressively abstract in this novel visual space. Following this development, Pride is the only vice to show little change in the way it is visualized. Within the iconographic programs of some church spaces mostly oriented towards constructing a social model using hagiographical topoi, Pride comes to be the only vice to keep her military attributes. Still personified as the dismounted cavalier, Pride becomes part of the universal eschatological perspective of the Last Judgment within the carved portal of the basilica of Sainte-Foy de Conques. The image has a local parallel in the episode of a knight’s fatal fall in the 11th century Book of Miracles of Saint Foy, with recent events remodeled on the episode of Prudentius’ learned poem. Thus, the image of a dismounted knight comes to stay in the visual allegory of the Middle Ages as an articulation of the aristocratic vice, one of the military elite. Starting as a mere episode in the allegorical combat of Virtues and Vices, the motif of Pride’s fall is shown to crystallize into a self-sufficient iconographic formula and literary topos.