Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Sirach and The Wisdom of Solomon. In the sort of literary parallelism that delighted medieval audiences,
Martini’s Mary might have been reading, just before the arrival of the angel, the very chapter of Isaiah
that announces her own fate: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel.”
But it is even more illuminating to surmise that Martini’s Mary is reading the Books of Wisdom.
In the ninth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is represented as a woman who “hath builded her
house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: … She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the
highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding,
she saith to him, Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled”. And in two other
sections of Proverbs, Lady Wisdom is described as originating from God. Through her He “hath founded
the earth” (3: 19) at the beginning of all things; “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or
ever the earth was” (8: 23). Centuries later, the Rabbi of Lublin explained that Wisdom was called
“Mother” because “when a man confesses and repents, when his heart accepts Understanding and is
converted by it, he becomes like a new-born child, and his own turning to God is like turning to his
mother.”
Lady Wisdom is the protagonist of one of the most popular books of the fifteenth century, L’Orloge de
Sapience (The Hourglass of Wisdom), written in (or translated into) French in 1389 by a Franciscan friar
from Lorraine, Henri Suso. Sometime between 1455 and 1460, an artist known to us as the Master of
Jean Rolin created for it a series of exquisite illuminations. One of these miniatures depicts Wisdom
sitting on her throne, surrounded by a garland of crimson angels, holding in her left arm the globe of the
world and in her right hand an open book. Above her, on both sides, larger angels kneel in a starry sky;
below her, to her right, five monks discuss two scholarly tomes open in front of them; to her left a
crowned donor, with a book set open on a draped lectern, is praying to her. Her position is identical to
that of God the Father, who sits on just such a golden throne in countless other illuminations, usually as a
companion piece to the Crucifixion, holding an orb in His left hand and a book in His right, and circled by

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similar fiery angels.
The Virgin represented with the attributes of Wisdom in an illuminated manuscript of Henri Suso’s
L’Orloge de Sapience. (photo credit 15.3)
Carl Jung, associating Mary with the Eastern Christian concept of Sophia or Wisdom, suggested that
Sophia-Mary “reveals herself to men as a friendly helper and advocate against Yahweh, and shows them
the bright side, the kind, just, and amiable aspect of their God”. Sophia, the Lady Wisdom of the Proverbs
and of Suso’s Orloge, stems from the ancient tradition of the Mother Goddess whose carved images, the
so-called Venus figurines, are found all over Europe and Northern Africa, dating back to between 25,000
and 15,000 BC, and throughout the world at later dates. When the Spaniards and Portuguese arrived in
the New World carrying their swords and their crosses, the Aztecs and Incas (among other native
peoples) transferred their beliefs in various earth-mother deities such as Tonantzin and Pacha Mama to an
androgynous Christ still evident in Latin American religious art today.
Around the year 500 the Frankish emperor Clovis, after converting to Christianity and reinforcing the role
of the Church, banned the worship of the Goddess of Wisdom under her several guises — Diana, Isis,
Athena — and closed down the last of her temples. Clovis’s decision followed to the letter Saint Paul’s
declaration (I Corinthians 1: 24) that only Christ is “the wisdom of God”. The attribute of wisdom, now
usurped from the female deity, became exemplified in the vast and ancient iconography depicting Christ
as a book-bearer. About twenty-five years after Clovis’s death, the Emperor Justinian attended the
consecration of Constantinople’s newly finished cathedral, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) — one of the
largest man-made structures of antiquity. There, tradition has it, he exclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone
thee!” Not one of the famous mosaics of Hagia Sophia — not even the majestic Virgin Enthroned of 867 —
allows Mary a book. Even in her own temple, Wisdom remained subservient.
Against this historical background, Martini’s portrayal of Mary as the inheritor — perhaps the incarnation
— of Holy Wisdom may be regarded as an effort to restore the intellectual power denied to the female
godhead. The book Mary is holding in Martini’s painting, whose text is hidden from us and whose title we
can only guess, might suggest itself as the last utterance of the dethroned goddess, a goddess older than
history, silenced by a society that has chosen to make its god in the image of a man. Suddenly, in this
light, Martini’s Annunciation becomes subversive.
Little is known of Simone Martini’s life. It is likely that he was a disciple of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the
father of Sienese painting; Martini’s first dated work, his Maestà of 1315, is based on Duccio’s model. He
worked in Pisa, Assisi and of course Siena, and in 1340 moved to Avignon, to the papal court, where two
ruined frescoes on the portal of the cathedral are all that remain of his work. We know nothing of his
education, of his intellectual influences, of the discussions he may have had about women and power and
the Mother of God and Our Lady of Wisdom, but in the red-bound book that he painted sometime during
the year 1333 for the Siena cathedral he left perhaps a clue to those questions, and possibly a statement.
Martini’s Annunciation was copied at least seven times. Technically it provided painters with an
alternative to the sober realism put forward by Giotto in his Padua Annunciation; philosophically it may
have enlarged the scope of Mary’s reading from Giotto’s minute Book of Hours to an entire theological
compendium with roots in the earliest beliefs in the wisdom of the goddess. In later depictions of Mary,
the Christ Child rumples or tears a page of the book she is reading, indicating His intellectual superiority.
The Child’s gesture represents the New Testament brought by Christ superseding the old one, but for
late-medieval viewers, to whom Mary’s relation to the Books of Wisdom may still have been apparent, the
image served also as a reminder of Saint Paul’s misogynist dictum.
The Child Jesus tearing the pages of the Old Testament, showing that the New One is coming into being,
in Rogier van der Weyden’s Virgin and Child, c. 1450. (photo credit 15.4)
I know that, for me, seeing someone reading creates in my mind a curious metonymy in which the
reader’s identity is coloured by the book and the setting in which it is being read. It seems appropriate
that Alexander the Great, who shares in the popular imagination the mythical landscape of Homer’s
heroes, always carried with him a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’d love to know what book Hamlet
held in his hands when he dismissed Polonius’s question — “What do you read, my lord?” — with “Words,
words, words”; that elusive title might tell me a little more about the prince’s cloudy character. The priest
who saved Joan Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc from the pyre to which he and the barber had destined Don

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Quixote’s maddening library, rescued for future generations an extraordinary novel of chivalry; by
knowing exactly what book Don Quixote was reading we can understand a little of the world which
fascinated the doleful knight — a reading through which we too can become, for a moment, Don Quixote.
Sometimes the process is reversed, and knowing the reader affects our judgement of a book: “I used to
read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying glass,” said Adolf Hitler of
the adventure-story writer Karl May, thereby condemning the author of such Wild West novels as The
Treasure of the Silver Lake to the fate of Richard Wagner, whose music wasn’t publicly performed in
Israel for years because Hitler had praised it.
Islamic fundamentalists burning a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (photo credit 15.5)
During the early months of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, when it became public knowledge that an
author had been threatened with death for writing a novel, the American TV reporter John Innes kept a
copy of The Satanic Verses on his desk whenever he delivered one of his commentaries on any number of
subjects. He made no reference to the book or to Rushdie, or to the Ayatollah, but the novel’s presence by
his elbow indicated one reader’s solidarity with the fate of the book and its author.
Court women of medieval times depicted in a woodcut by Hishikawa Moronobu in the 1681 edition of the
Ukiyo Hyakunin Onna. (photo credit 15.6)

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