La Chronique Scandaleuse 2: The Case of Denise Poncher and Her Vision of Death

Denise Poncher before a Vision of Death

 Illumination from The Poncher Hours (c. 1500)

by the Master of the Chronique scandaleuse

(Tempera colours, ink and gold on parchment) [1]

 

I. 

 

As Bataille once said: Nothing is more scandalous than death ... 

 

So it's not so surprising that the anonymous artist known as le Maître de la Chronique scandaleuse should contribute a terrifying vision of death to an illuminated manuscript called The Poncher Hours that he collaborated on with several other artists in or around 1500. 

 

 

II. 

 

Born some date after 1487, Denise Poncher was a member of an elite French family; her father served as a treasurer for the crown and her uncle was the bishop of Paris. Like many young women of her class, she desired her own personalised prayer book (or book of hours); items which were very much in vogue during the late Middle Ages, particularly in the French capital which was famous throughout Europe for producing the most exquisite works.  

 

Probably commissioned as a wedding gift - there are numerous references to marriage and motherhood in the text - The Poncher Hours is written in French and Latin and contains some astonishing illuminations, beginning with a full-page vision of the Virgin enframed by a mandorla and flanked by St. Barbara and St. Catherine.   

 

But the most striking and, as I have said, most scandalous image, is the vision of death showing a fashionably dressed Mlle. Poncher kneeling, prayer book in hand, before a skeleton with bits of rotting flesh still hanging from the bones and - in full grim reaper mode - holding several scythes. 

 

Just to complete the nightmare scenario, three persons whom Death has already claimed lie on the ground nearby, "covered with bloody wounds and staring with wide, sightless eyes" [2].

 

Doubtless the picture was intended to serve as a stark reminder of human mortality and of the importance of saying one's prayers in order to ensure the soul's salvation. But, to a modern mind, it's of highly questionable taste and not the sort of thing a young woman on her wedding night should have to worry about. 

 

Unless that is, like Bataille, you happen to believe that death and sex are intimately entwined and that eroticism is a saying yes to life conceived as merely a very rare and unusal way of being dead ...

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] The Poncher Hours was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2011: click here to visit the Getty website from which I gleaned much of the information used in the writing of this post.    

[2] Elizabeth Morrison, 'Marriage, Death, and the Power of Prayer: The Hours of Denise Poncher', in The Getty Research Journal, Vol. 6, (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 143-50. Click here to access via JSTOR. Morrison is senior curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum.   

 

To read part one of this post - on the case of Claude Le Petit - click here.  

 

This post is for the artist Heide Hatry; a woman with her own distinctive vision de la mort.