Venus and Christ in Chaucer's Complaint of Mars: The Fairfax 16 Frontispiece

Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16 contains one of the most accomplished illuminations to be associated with any of Chaucer's works. The full-page illustration preceding the Complaint of Mars (fol. 14v; fig. 1) rivals in skill even the much-discussed Troilus frontispiece (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 61, fol. 1v), but Chaucer criticism has generally ignored the Fairfax picture.¹ This is so in part, of course, because the Complaint of Mars has held less intrinsic interest than Troilus and Criseyde, even though the two poems are so similar in theme that the Complaint has been called a "miniature Troilus."² It is also—perhaps more—because the Fairfax image has been deemed unreadable in terms of the poem it accompanies. It has seemed all too clear, as Julia Boffey explains it, that the image derives from artistic precedents completely unconnected with Chaucer's work, and that it exists only because "a convenient iconographic tradition associated with the story

Fig. 1.

Mars. Oxford, Bodleian MS Fairfax 16, fol. 14v. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

of Mars and Venus was already available."³ In a similar dismissal, Theresa Tinkle observes that the frontispiece "carries to Chaucer's poem little meaning but takes its meaning from that poem."⁴ What we might wish to think an idiosyncratic visual reaction to Chaucer's rather unusual text appears from this perspective to be a thoroughly conventional medieval picture of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter.

But precisely for this reason, the Fairfax illumination poses in an acute form the question that is unfortunately central to the study of decoration in Chaucerian manuscripts: What can be learned from even the most perfunctory conjunction of image and text? Illustration of vernacular literature is so rare and so limited in late medieval England that many readers have echoed John Fleming's lament: "If we wish to visualize Chaucer with Gothic eyes we must turn to the painted pages of Boccaccio and Jean de Meun."⁵ The overlooked Fairfax miniature demonstrates, on the contrary, that the native artistic tradition can on occasion offer significant visual context to readers of Middle English poetry. Moreover, although the picture is undoubtedly conventional, the interplay of its conventions brings meaning to its textual environment that—even if it was not planned for—enriches our experience of Chaucer's Complaint. Using techniques of deliberate borrowing between devotional and courtly art—techniques that Barbara Newman has recently termed "crossover"—the Complaint of Mars and the Fairfax frontispiece explore in parallel the relation of Christian ideas to classical ones.⁶ The Fairfax artist adopts images central to the sacred tradition as symbols of the power of courtly passion, and Chaucer's poem fashions secular love-lament into Christian theodicy. The "crossover" iconography of the picture is more than merely convenient in this setting, for the relation between text and image here reveals the ways in which classical narrative, in each medium, can be shaped by traditions of Christian complaint.

Bodleian MS Fairfax 16 is one of the so-called Oxford group of manuscript anthologies of fifteenth-century verse, which contain a variety of shorter Chaucerian poems, as well as courtly material by such authors as Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate.⁷ The collection was most likely commissioned in the mid-fifteenth century by John Stanley (1400?–1469) from a commercial scriptorium or bookseller, perhaps in London. It has been designated "quasi-fascicular," for even though its sections were copied by the same scribe, they are separated by blank leaves and foliated by different hands; it seems to have been constructed from booklets chosen by the patron.⁸ Booklet I, which begins with the Complaint of Mars, contains courtly poetry by Chaucer, Clanvowe, Lydgate, and Hoccleve, as well as two light, gaming verses, "The Rolles of Kyng Ragman," and "The Chaunces of the Dyce." Booklet II begins with an integrated grouping of some of Chaucer's minor lyrics, then concludes with a more miscellaneous selection of minor works by Hoccleve and Lydgate...