A Feast of the Arts: Joanna of Castile in Brussels, 1496

Abstract

As the only late fifteenth-century picture book devoted to a ‘joyous entry’, inv. 78.D.5 of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett is a source of singular importance, conveying a total of twenty-seventableaux vivantsstaged for Joanna of Castile (‘the Mad’) on the occasion of her entry into Brussels, 15 December 1496, as duchess of Brabant. The present contribution focuses on two tableaux with musical subject matter, consciously displayed at the very beginning and at the very end: Jubal and Tubalcain, the biblical inventors of music, on the one hand, and St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary with Child, enriched by the means of angelic musicians, on the other. Besides iconographic issues, special emphasis is placed on Joanna, her musical inclinations, and the respective institutional background: whereas the St Luke tableau contributes to the corporate identity of Brussels's painters' guild, the biblical inventor of music allows for the self-presentation of the rhetoricians, who were in charge of ‘programming’ the joyous entry and its festive apparatus. In sum, political messages have been musically disguised; uncommon biblical or even extra-biblical subjects become vehicles for a complex layer of meaning that permeates the public space.

Juana of Castile’s Book of Hours: An Archduchess at Prayer

“…70 'Obsecro te domine pater spiritus angelice minister celestis imperii cui deus omnipotens mei custodiam deputauit indefiniter protegas uisites et defendas ab omni incursu et impugnatione dyaboli uigilantem et dormientem stantem.' 71 According to Tammen (2011), the sketches showing the tableaux vivants for the entry are in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. 79D5, fol.…”