Reading Stained Glass: Corpus Christi and the Pelican

‘A wonderful bird is the pelican …’* Anyone who only knew about pelicans from this celebrated limerick might be forgiven for smiling at the mere thought of these rather bizarre birds. But the pelican, along with the dove and the eagle, is one of the most important symbols in Christian iconography. I believe his earliest appearance in stained glass - though from now on I must say ‘her’, not ‘his’ – is in Chartres Cathedral (fig.ii) in the 13^th century ‘Redemption window’ where a pelican, with wings outstretched, pecks at her breast to allow her chicks to feed on her blood. The seated king, looking on, is David, and in his hand he holds a long scroll with the inscription ‘Similis factus sum pellicamo’ (from Psalm 102: ‘I am become like the pelican in the wilderness’). So this one image both looks back to the Old Testament, foreshadowing of the loneliness of Jesus in the wilderness, and forward to the crucifixion and the redemptive shedding of Christ’s own blood. The pelican becomes established as the symbol of Corpus Christi, the body [and blood] of Christ. The feast of

Corpus Christi is always observed on the second Thursday after Whit Sunday. In the later middle ages, this was an important public holiday, celebrated with processions, pageants and mystery plays performed by members of the different Guilds. All long gone, now, but the pelican remains.

 

From then until now, the elements of the symbol – the bird, the blood, the chicks and the nest –

hardly change. They appear throughout Europe not only in stained glass but in stone and wood carving too, for instance on a 15^th century misericord in Cartmel Priory (Cumberland; fig. iii).

 

Oxford and Cambridge each have a Corpus Christi College, and an heraldic pelican appears on the arms of both. At Cambridge the college was founded in 1352 jointly by the Guild of Corpus Christi and the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, hence the shield is quartered between the pelican and the lilies that are the symbol of Mary. At Oxford, Corpus Christi was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, whose own crest was a golden pelican. There is a splendid 16^th century sundial in the College quad, surmounted by a pelican in her piety.

 

The pelican is one of the very few pre-Reformation religious symbols to have survived the upheavals in English church life during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Later, indeed, she enjoyed a dramatic revival in stained glass during the 19^th century. A remarkable image in an early (1864) window by  Morris & Co at Bradford Cathedral depicts the pelican in graphic, almost comical, close-up (fig.iv:) staring – or glaring? –  down her beak at the first rubber-necked chick, she struggles to steer a glob of blood towards his gaping mouth while the other two wait eagerly for their turn. 

 

The range of textures and patterns in this image is worth our attention. At the base flowers and grass reach up around the neatly woven wicker basket of a nest in which the downy chicks appear half submerged in hay. The dark blue background is an intricate pattern of tiny quatrefoils created out of a lattice work of black lines and dashes, all painted on by hand. Looking carefully, you can see one or two places where the design goes wrong. At the top the wavy grey-green clouds are actually the only indication that this is a religious symbol at all: clouds represented like this, though rather less freehand than here, always denoted in medieval glass the clouds of heaven and William Morris was careful to follow that precedent. The artist who designed this window was Morris’s close friend, Philip Webb.  

 

At Much Marcle in Herefordshire she appears above the Crucifixion scene in the church’s East

window (fig.v), designed in 1877 for Charles Eamer Kempe by Wyndham Hope Hughes. This design clearly shows Kempe’s debt to the Chartres pelican, but with the rather neat added touch that the nest is drawn as the cup of an acorn and the bird perches on a branch of oak leaves.  

 

No artist in the 19^th century paid more attention to the pelican than Kempe, for whom the bird had a special significance. That Kempe often signed his windows with a wheatsheaf – one of the elements of his family’s coat of arms – is well known; much less well known is that the crest on top of the Kempe shield depicts a pelican pecking at a wheatsheaf. For Kempe, this image had a key symbolic significance. He had originally hoped to be ordained as an Anglican priest, but a severe stammer prevented this and after leaving university he decided to develop a career in church decoration and stained glass. Throughout his career he believed that he had a special vocation to teach and indeed to preach through his windows. What he could not say from the pulpit because of his stammer, he could express though stained glass.  It is no surprise that the poet George Herbert meant a great deal to him:

 

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

            When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

            Doth vanish like a flaring thing …. (‘The Windows’)

 

He came indeed to see the wheatsheaf and the pelican, his personal crest, (fig.vi) as an endorsement of his vocation, for together they are emblematic of the Eucharist – the wheatsheaf representing the bread and the pelican, the wine. No other stained glass designer invested the pelican with greater presence, nor saw the bird so clearly as the embodiment of Christ. Whenever you see a pelican in a window, look also for the text accompanying it. If this reads ‘Ihesus pelicanus noster’ (Jesus our Pelican; fig.i - see above) the window is by Kempe.

 

© Adrian Barlow

 

*A wonderful bird is the pelican: 

His bill can hold more than his belly can.

He can keep in his beak

Enough food for a week

But I’m blowed if I know how the hell he can!

              Dixon Lanier Merritt (1910)

 

You can read more about the significance of the pelican in my book, Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

 

Illustrations:

Fig. i:  Pelican in her Piety by John Carter for C.E. Kempe, in St Botolph’s Church, Cambridge, 1889

Fig. ii: King David and the Pelican in her Piety, Chartres Cathedral, 13^th century

Fig. iii: Pelican in her Piety, carved misericord seat in Cartmel Priory, 15^th century

Fig.iv: Pelican in her Piety (by Philip Webb, for Morris & Co.) Bradford Cathedral, 1864

Fig v: Pelican in her Piety, by Wyndham Hope Hughes for C.E. Kempe, St Bartholomew’s Church, Much Marcle, 1877

Fig.vi: Kempe’s Bookplate, depicting the Pelican and the Wheatsheaf

 

All photographs © the author.

 

 

 

Reading Stained Glass: Good Friday

When I was a child, I was fascinated by a picture that hung in my father’s study. It was (as I learned much later) a Baxter Print of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, (1612-14; fig.i) and I wish I had it now, for images of the Deposition – its alternative name – have a long history in stained glass, going back at least to the 12^th century. None, though, are quite like Rubens’ altarpiece. 

Rubens’ tableau has no fewer than five men, four ladders, three women, and the magnificently athletic but pallid corpse of the dead Jesus being lowered into the arms of John, the beloved disciple. To help take the backbreaking strain, St. John has placed his right foot onto the second rung of a ladder. In accordance with tradition, he is dressed in a red robe, while Mary is already in deep mourning. Joseph of Arimathea, swathed in a huge cloak and wearing a red bonnet, looks more like a Venetian magnifico than a member of the Sanhedrin. He holds one end of a white linen winding sheet; the other end is clamped between the teeth of one of his servants, who stretches over the cross piece of the crucifix to prevent Christ’s lifeless arm from flopping down.

The tableau is magnificently staged: Mary Magdalene kneels cradling Christ’s left leg as the body descends; behind her, the third woman (Salome, also kneeling) gazes up at St John, who seems to return her gaze. The props are all in place, too: the nails have been removed from the cross and lie on the ground. The piece of paper bearing the inscription ‘Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews’ in Greek, Latin and Hebrew has been weighted down by a stone at the foot of the right-hand ladder. Next to it, on a silver charger, lies the discarded crown of thorns.

Compare Rubens’ Descent with this image (Chartres, early C13; fig. ii) from a window in Chartres

Cathedral. It’s part of a sequence of Passiontide scenes, each enclosed within a red frame; not entirely enclosed, however, for the top and bottom of the cross protrude above and below the frame. So, too, does the foot of the servant – or perhaps he is the executioner, still on the scene?  He kneels to extract the nail from Christ’s left foot, using a large pair of pincers for the job. After this, though, he may need a ladder to reach the nail still pinning the left hand of Jesus to the Cross.   Mary is already holding his right hand to her cheek while Joseph of Arimathea, next to her, strains to support the deadweight of his upper body. Joseph's foot, too, is now outside the red frame. By contrast with the Rubens tableau, here the only inactive one of the four figures around the Cross is St John, who seems overcome by grief. Both Mary and John have red haloes. So does Jesus but, as always, his halo is marked with three of the four corners of the Cross and now, for the first time, these marks recognize an historical event: they no long point forward to the destiny that would await him.

Why, finally, is the Cross green? This is an early example of a trope that appeared first in stained glass of the 13^th century and was revived by Charles Eamer Kempe in the 19^th century: the idea of the Cross as the Arbor Vitae, the Tree of Life. The Cross was shown as green to symbolise the idea that it was living wood - lignum vitae as St Bonaventure described it. If you think this idea too fanciful and suspect that the original artist simply wanted to use a third key colour, green, to offset the dominant red and blue, look again; along both the upright and the crosspiece you can see lines of bubbles flowing up and across. These symbolically represent the sap rising  - as can be seen in an earlier window at Chartres: the Jesse window(c.1150). At the foot of this window, Jesse lies asleep with the trunk of a tree springing up from his groin: the trunk is shown in cross-section, with the sap (Jesse’s seed, so less) clearly rising to indicate that the succeeding generations are his direct descendents.

I said above that I thought the man with the pincers was either a servant or perhaps the executioner.

Not everyone would agree. Malcolm Miller, the great authority on the glass of Chartres and a man I much admire, identifies him as Nicodemus, basing his identification both on the reference to Nicodemus in St John’s account of the burial of Christ (John 19:39) and on the fact that in a similar but earlier image of the Deposition in Chartres, the man with the pincers is more clearly Nicodemus because he wears a conical Jewish hat – as befits a man who, like Joseph of Arimathea, was a prominent member of the Jewish community in Jerusalem.  

I am afraid I disagree with Malcolm Miller here. Not only in this image is the man shown without a hat, he is here wearing the plain short tunic of a slave, not of a high-profile Pharisee. There is a further point: in later stained-glass illustrations, as for instance at Fairford (Gloucestershire) the man assisting at the Deposition is very clearly the executioner. You can see him here (Fairford, c.1500; fig.iii) climbing down from the Cross with the body of Christ, floppy as a rag doll, hanging over his arm. And tucked carefully into his belt are the same pincers as seen at Chartres: instruments of the Passion, tools of the executioner’s trade. 

Adrian Barlow

Text and illustrations © Adrian Barlow

This is the second of three linked posts. Here is the link to the first: Reading Stained Glass: Maundy Thursday