Once upon a time, a King murdered a Bishop. Trust me, there’s a political backstory, but at the end of the day, king-and-murderer Bolesław the Bold was deposed and banished from the country. He took refuge with King Ladislaus I of Hungary, but accounts claim that Bolesław continued to be a nasty piece of work in Hungary as well, ticked people off, and was poisoned. Or maybe he was sent on pilgrimage and died repentant in a monastery?
Or perhaps he was reconciled and given a good clean death surrounded by companions befitting his station?
Early on, he was known as Bolesław “the Generous,” and later Bolesław the Bold. To us, he might be Bolesław the Ambiguous, though, because the line between legend and fact is hard to determine in his case. The historical story and legend intertwine in the literature, and yes, Wikipedia here is one of the best capsule summaries I’ve found. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boles%C5%82aw_II_the_Bold). This is definitely foreign territory for me.
But, I went down this gripping story of betrayal and posthumous reputation because of a pictorial representation of his death. The focus of the whole set of panels is actually on St Stanislaus, the martyred saint whose death he caused, but the scene of Bolesław’s own death is a bit of a puzzle and worth spending time on. In a cycle devoted to his victim, why doesn’t the king get his comeuppance at the end?
IMAGE: The Death of King Bolesław II (grouped with the Death of St Stanislaus, and the Miracle at St St Stanislaus’s Relic), Anonymous, 1490 – Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galeria, photographs by Cynthia Cyrus, CC-BY 4.0
We have a whole series of interlocking groupings, shaped by environment and identity, and these are the pieces of which our puzzle is made. Moving across the image in columns, we have three large areas.
Consider the various levels on the left side of the image.
We have a Virgin and Child, her mantle in white and draped on the ground, her head pointing to 10-o’clock instead of noon / midnight; she's floating on a gold background, her halo and the infant’s inscribed in the gold as outlines, her high forehead visible. The rest of the sky is remarkably abstract, with gold droplets or blobs on the largely wooden backdrop.
A town on the water – the hillside across the way providing a suggestion of an oversized skull. (And as is the way of such things, once I saw a skull there, I couldn’t unsee it. If rocks and boulders can be grouped to remind us of death, the landscape contributes to our sense of earthly closure).
The town itself provided with shade and white highlighting that serves to emphasize roof-lines and the possibly octagonal (or decagonal) tower as well as the varied window shapes with arches and rectangles enlivening the building fronts. Trees and a shed appear in the nearer ground, and an out-of-proportion dog with bone, showing us his nearness in perspective. Loyalty, fidelity: the dog teaches us the ultimate morality of the people he joins.
Screens and/or doors as backdrop to the huddle of figures, eight on the back side of the bed accompanying the bearded Bolesław, propped up and gesturing with what might be last words. The crowd has three figures with bishop’s mitres and not-scallops – jewels with ornate settings pinned to the hats on either side of a center band. Two others have gray cloth wrappings for headdress, one looking down and wearing a plain black outfit, the other standing at the very back and glancing directly at the viewer. The remaining three appear to be more secular in nature. A young person with abundant curly hair and a cap wears armor and knee-length green cloak but sports curled-at-the-toes shoes in red; another bearded figure with shaggy light brown hear has a two-toned black and yellow hat and the same yellow lines the hood of his buttoned red cloak. The final middle figure is half-a-row back, and wears a black cap that covers hair and most of his ears; he has a black-on-black robe.
In front, on the “viewer” side of the bed, stands another figure, wearing red with slashed sleeves showing a lighter undergarment; this figure has a mustache and a pleated cap; a chain or a rib of embroidered cloth appears at the nape of his neck.
The man in bed is elderly; note the gray and white hair, the wrinkled skin of the elbow, the slightly flabby arm muscles. The coronet with open foliate ornament, its point terminating in trefoil and fleur-de-lis forms – with cross atop – is backed by fabric or cloth, so functions as cap as well as crown. His body is in stasis, tucked into bed, with only his head, torso, and arms showing.
But, Bolesław’s hands are busy: he gestures with pointer finger, and the other hand seems to be scooping the air. This draws our attention to the other figures’ hands as well – the black-dressed man holds his hand in a similar scooping gesture; one of the bishops is counting with the right pointer aimed at left thumb on closed fist; and curly-locks too uses the scooping gesture in his right hand, while his left leans on the edge of the bed, fingertips touching the presumably brocade cloth. The bedcloth, however, is protected by a folded-down sheet; the bed has been made just as my mother taught me, with the blanket not touched by the hands of the one in the bed, only the sheet.
And then there’s that figure on “our” side of the bed. The left hand is lifting something – a bottle lid? A folded paper cone? And the right hand is engaged (again with cupping gesture) in holding up a beaker. On the table are a variety of objects: a small cup, a paper scroll with writing that spills over the table; a case, possibly leather, with instruments (is that an ink pot? Cupping equipment?). The remainder of the table-top seems coded differently: a covered chalice; a golden plate and cup, a five-knobbed book with two buckled straps, and a larger covered chalice suggest religious purposes. The table-cloth with its stripes could in another environment be an altar cloth.
In front of the table is a wooden bucket held together by two hoops; it contains two items, a lidded pitcher with spout, and a lidded tankard.
Having spent some time with the depiction itself, there were a few important emergent elements in this image that spoke to me:
First among these is the management of the dying body. One element that struck me as notable is that liquids are everywhere, but always contained: there’s a beaker, cup, covered vessels, pitcher, tankard, bucket. There’s something to that, I think. Containment is critical. Moreover, the scene presents dying not simply as an event but as something attended, provisioned, measured, and managed. Even if we cannot securely identify the red-clad attendant as physician/apothecary, the imagery strongly suggests care directed toward the body. And that’s not the forgiveness-of-sins kind of care that a murdering king might require; we’re not in the realm of last rites and sacred oils, at least not as observable action. We’re in the human realm of treat-and-watch. *Something* is being done, but we as viewers only see the counting on the thumb and the raising of the lid on the container; we don’t see the action but the contemplation of action. It’s a wonderful space for ambiguity.
To my eye, the artist is playing with us as viewers; I suspect my own incapacity to say for certain what the objects are may have been a deliberate choice. I think that is because in this image, the artist is exploiting the overlap between medical and sacramental vocabularies. The table is delightfully unstable: some objects look therapeutic or domestic, others liturgical, and as I said, the striped cloth can almost become an altar cloth. That ambiguity may be more important than identifying every vessel. At the deathbed, bodily care and preparation for eternity occupy the same visual field. Nifty, eh?
Faith without conspicuous ritual. We have those bishops, the sacred-looking vessels, and the Virgin and Child above—but remarkably little overt performance of the rites of dying. No obvious priest administering a sacrament, no book being read aloud, no prominently displayed crucifix, no prayers at the foot of the bed. The sacred permeates the scene without dominating it ceremonially. It’s sacrality in a domestic context, yet one situated in the larger landscape. That memento mori skull-like formation meets up with the dying man and with the sacred raindrops of an unfinished sky. It is an interesting juxtaposition.
Gesture substitutes for audible speech. The repeated pointing, counting, and cupped and open-handed gestures make this an unusually active deathbed. We cannot hear the king’s last words, but the painting insists that communication is occurring. Hands create a visible rhetoric of counsel, explanation, response, and perhaps testimony. Furthermore, this is death made socially legible. We don’t have an intimate farewell between one dying man and a beloved companion, nor a community lifting up their representative through visible attributes of prayer. The open book(s) with prayer-giver(s), the praying hands, the candles of other kingly deathbed images are missing here. Instead, the bed is surrounded by representatives of different identities and statuses: ecclesiastical, courtly, perhaps medical. The king’s death is consequently visible as public, witnessed, and socially authenticated – things important to kingship, but quite possibly absent in Bolesław’s own life!
The “why” of these decisions for an anonymous fifteenth century artist seems to me to lie in the realm of creating a controlled or rehabilitated death. Given Bolesław’s unstable legendary biography, we’re getting a narrative of successful reconciliation that puts him back in the cognomen “the Generous” or “the Bold” – and not “ Bolesław the excommunicate.” For a presumably Hungarian artist who knew of Bolesław’s role in establishing Hungarian kingly lineage -- he'd put Ladislaus on the throne! -- we may be getting a story where the mistaken politics of end of life are subsumed in the human drama of death-as-exculpatory. And certainly, given our painting’s position as part of the St Stanislaus cycle, our panel sets out an argument that Stanislaus's sanctity does not require Bolesław's damnation. In our representation, Bolesław does not appear abandoned, nor poisoned in disgrace, nor grotesquely punished. Instead, he dies crowned (with a cross to signal his place in the fold), accompanied by people of many stations, articulate and alert, and attended by bishops. In short, the painter gives us a socially and religiously reordered ending for a morally compromised ruler.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN…
- Practicing Death: The “Seven Last Words” at Thalbach — What did it mean to prepare for a good death? A messy text addition to a Thalbach prayerbook turns Christ’s Seven Last Words into a how-to for dying: confession, reconciliation, letting go, and the rather important business of getting one’s soul ready.
- Dominican Prayer Gestures — Hands matter. Medieval prayer was something you did with the body Gestures could make interior states visible to everyone watching. Bows, prostrations, raised hands, kissed books: a bit of gestural grammar for thinking about what all those busy hands in medieval images might be saying.
- The North Wall of Brand’s Parish Church: Challenges of Interpretation — Sometimes the surviving image simply won’t tell you exactly what it is. Faded saints, uncertain gestures, and a set of missing saints: an exercise in looking hard, comparing evidence, and knowing when “might” is the most responsible answer.
