Tetchy Madonnas when you need them – Michelle Lovric

Make your way around any corner in Venice and you may lock eyes with a Madonna in a niche or a miniature chapel. She might be painted, sculpted or made from mosaic tiles. There may be a candle, a lamp or a vase in front of her. She usually cradles the Holy Infant. These street shrines are known capitelli (or capitèi in Venetian dialect). Many date back to the 15th century, a time when they provided not just metaphorical and spiritual illumination but actual street-lighting. Most are to be found, for that reason, in ‘sottoportici’ (tunnel-like passageways) or by bridges and near jetties.

The city appointed people to set a lantern in every capitello by night. There was a tradition of leaving flowers there too. To lend sanctity to business arrangements, contracts might be signed in front of them. And of course a Madonna might serve as a kind spiritual proto-security camera on the street: few would want to commit a crime in front of those steady eyes. Those were times when no one would have dreamed of stealing a holy image, but most often, these days, the Madonnas are behind bars, like solemn canaries in ornate cages.


There are more than 500 capitelli in Venice: 136 in Castello; 91 in Cannaregio; 43 in Santa Croce; 43 in San Polo; 114 in Dorsoduro, of which 35 are on Giudecca; 83 in San Marco. It is interesting to note that the highest proportion of the figures are in the poorer zones of Castello and Cannaregio. The painting above, by James Holland, is entitled A Shrine in Venice (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). It shows women of the city sewing, talking and praying in front of a capitello, which serves both as an extension of sacred space but also as a meeting place.

I’m not the only or even the first person to notice that the Virgins inside these little chapels often look rather disapproving. I discovered that my artist friend, Christine Morley, who’s recorded many of them, has also felt the aura of severity that radiates from some of these Virgins. To Christine, they seem like stern gate-keepers to a world beyond the wall, a secret place behind the forbidding bars and grates of their niches.

Of course, over hundreds of years these Venetian Madonnas have seen it all, which may account for their expressions. Meanwhile, full of grace She obviously is, but is not the Virgin Mary one of the most put-upon women ever?

A couple of years ago, I started holding conversations (in my head) with some of these dimly-lit ladies-of-the-night as I walked around the city. Those conversations took a turn I had not expected. This is why: although each street-Madonna is as individual as Her artist could render Her, each personifies the same Mother of God. So I felt that the Madonnas from Castello to Santa Croce would in fact talk with the same voice and have the same preoccupations – including annoyance at noisy passers-by waking the Holy Infant when She’d just got Him down.

No matter whether painted or carved, my Madonna-of-the-moment was always irreproachably virtuous in tone, but also just a little bit reproachful, not to say tetchy. Irritation is a gift for a writer: it scratches up interesting vocabulary. So you won’t be surprised to hear that this slightly vinegary Madonna-of-many-manifestations soon became a character in a children’s book, The Wishing Bones, which will be published next month.

Children have always had the run of Venice. It’s safer than cities with carriages and now cars. In The Wishing Bones, I write of the ‘secret sacred ties’ between Venetians, binding all her citizens to one another with affection. The picture below right shows mother holding her child up to a painted Madonna at capitello near the entrance to the Doges Palace (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). A slightly older Venetian child, on his or her daily journeys, would pass by dozens of Madonnas, and it seemed logical to me that their universal Mother would probably have a few things to say to them. I imagined that Our Lady would be keen on personal hygiene in a city that was obsessed with health matters (if Venice ever got the reputation of being a sick city, her international trade would have been in danger). So I thought She’d probably want Her supplicants to have clean hands. Running noses would be absolutely out.


 

Venice identifies comprehensively with the Virgin Mary. The city’s very founding date – March 25th – is the same as that of the Annunciation. This scene is depicted in marble on the Rialto Bridge. But in my book, Our (understandably Ornery) Lady has to deal with rival protectresses of the city: mermaids who live beneath it. Pagan mermaids and Madonnas – bound to be a problem. Then there’s a convent where fake relics of saints are churned out by orphans working as slaves in cruel conditions – an offence to any mother. Saint Lucy’s bones have been kidnapped. A prophecy dictates that, if this happens, the secret sacred ties between Venetians will break down, leading to blows and blood in the street. Really, for a Madonna in 1740, when The Wishing Bones is set, there’s a lot to be tetchy about.

The whole issue of mermaids and Madonnas is played out, in everyone’s favourite church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. Inside, Tullio Lombardo’s friezes of beautiful young mermaids enclose an ancient miracle-working painting of a Madonna. In The Wishing Bones, the young Miracoli mermaids, clearly victimized by adolescent hormones, briefly flee their frieze to join the villains. (Then they’re very sorry).

Back to the real-lifeVenetian capitelli. They have their own story arc. While loved and maintained by the state and the public, the street-Madonnas have not been immune to passing time. By the middle of the nineteenth century the little chapels were under threat, some degraded by the centuries, some removed or damaged during restructuring and renovations. So in 1870 a group of young Catholics set up an organisation to defend them. The city was divided into sections and groups of young Venetians patrolled the streets, making sure all was well with the capitelli.

By the twentieth century, the chapels were under a different threat – chemicals coming from the factory suburb of Marghera. A new generation of capitelli protectors, the Amici dei capitèi, was formed but later absorbed into one of the bigger organisations that protect sacred monuments, I.R.S.E.P.S.

It's not surprising that the gondoliers still have their own waterborne capitelli. These little green shrines are to be seen at the stazioni where the traghetto services run. Inside their mullioned windows you can make out tiny Madonnas. If Venice were living her best life right now, those Madonnas would be doing something to protect her from the cruise liners.

But this is real life, and fiction can only imagine away the brutal ugliness and danger of the cruise ships. That’s increasingly hard, with the news of the massive Viking Sigyn running down a smaller vessel on the Danube in Budapest two weeks ago; with the vast MSC Opera smashing, out of control, into a river-cruise boat and then into the Zattere in Venice on June 2nd; with the 30th anniversary of Marchioness disaster approaching in August; with the Thames now threatened with the arrival of Europe’s biggest party boat, the Ocean Diva, which is the length of a football pitch and hosts 1500 revellers. The great historic cities of Europe are succumbing to Dubai-ification.

 

Not just Venice but Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bergen and many others have succumbed to this brutal commodification by the mega-companies that run fleets of vast boats. The protest movements are energetic and creative, but what Venetians called 'interessi' are deeply entrenched. Too many people, it seems, have fingers in the pie: not just the cruise operators but also those institutions that licence piers and party boats; also, those companies that service and provide catering for them.

 

Too much greed leads to too many monsters cramming into the same far-too-finite waterways. The danger to life and the ruination of heritage views are all too visible; possibly worse are the invisible dangers of nitrogen oxide, sulphur and particulates, for marine fuel is many times more toxic that land diesel. These poisons make their ways into the lungs of the citizens and they also destroy public art. The statue at right, on the Gesuati church, is just a few hundred yards from where the MSC Opera struck the shore. In a city without cars, boat emissions are the only reason for the blackening and blunting of this saintly figure.

Writing about, and so living in the 18th century, I can blot the mega-ships off my horizons. However, into my next book, currently entitled The Palace that Ate Boys, has crept the notion of certain public offices in the city – those charged with protecting Venice – instead welcoming in a terrible blight in exchange for sackfuls of money …

Michelle Lovric's website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th in the UK.

Last week marked the second anniversary of the terror attack at London Bridge and the Borough Market. Five hundred people were locked in or out of their homes for days, as their streets became a crime scene. A year ago, at Southwark Cathedral, members of the community performed a play made up of excerpts of their longer testimonies. This year, the Cathedral has posted the text of Testimony online so everyone can read it.

'Caterpillars, Cowslips and Candlemas Bells' by Karen Maitland

Snowdrops in Lothersdale Churchyard

Photographer: Tim Green

February is traditionally the month in which the first flowers would have blossomed in an English medieval ‘Mary Garden.’ These were snowdrops, believed to have been introduced to Britain by Italian monks. Snowdrops were also known as Candlemas Bells or Purification Flowers, because an old medieval custom was to remove any statue or image of Virgin Mary from the churches or private chapels on Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification (2nd February) and scatter snowdrops in the space where the statues had stood.

There are many different types of medieval gardens, but I always think the ‘Mary Gardens’ or ‘Our Lady’s Gardens’ must have been some of the loveliest, and would have provided flowers nearly all year round. Many medieval religious houses and manors included a special secluded garden, set apart from the others, which was stocked only with the plants dedicated to the Virgin Mary. These would include cowslips which were known as Our Lady’s Keys; Woodruff – Our Lady’s Lace; Violets – Our Lady’s Modesty; and Lily-of-the-Valley – Our Lady’s tears.

Madonna of the Rose Garden. c1435

The Mary Garden would have a number of different white flowering plants which were associated with the Virgin as the symbol of purity, but it would also include sweet-smelling herbs such as rosemary because its flowers were said to have turned as blue as Mary’s cloak when she hung it on the bush to dry. Pennyroyal and thyme would also be in the garden because the shepherds were said to have perfumed the stable in which Mary lay with these herbs, and the Christmas rose which according to medieval legends either turned from black to white when Mary gave birth or sprang from the tears of a girl who wept because she had no gift to offer the baby. So even in winter, a Mary Garden, must have been a tranquil delight for the all the senses, as well as the haven for birds and insects.

In religious houses, Mary Gardens were made by monks or nuns assisted by lay servants, but in manor houses or wealthy households, this was often the garden that the lady of the house and her daughters would tend. They obviously wouldn’t do the hard labour of digging or fertilising, but they were taught how to plan the garden, give instructions to servants on when and what to plant and to do some of the day to day maintenance such as dead heading, pruning, collecting and drying seeds for next year’s planting.

Cowslips  at Waylands Smithy on  the Ridgeway

Photographer: James Broadbent

In Paris 1393, a young wife was advised to ‘plant wet and sow dry,’ in her garden, a saying I remember my great aunt teaching me as a child. Male farmers and gardeners were advised to walk on dug or ploughed land. If it ‘cried or made any kind of noise under foot’, it was too wet to sow, but if it made no noise ‘you should sow in the name of God.’ Another test for male gardeners was sit ‘bare-arsed’ on the soil to feel if it was warm enough to sow.

Seeds were often dressed with mixtures of urine, lime and even sulphur to discourage mice. Seeds were carefully collected, dried and stored, not only for use in the garden the following year, but the women understood that swapping seeds to produce a healthy garden was also vital.

'One seed for another to make an exchange
With fellowly neighbour seemeth not strange.'

But even in a garden dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Satan’s little imps were bound to make mischief and the servants would have been instructed to keep garden pests under control. A lady didn’t want her cut flowers or strewing herbs crawling with ants or caterpillars. So, sawdust was sprinkled round ants’ nests to discourage them, or to protect individual trees and bushes, a mixture or red earth and tar was used to ring the trunks to prevents ants climbing up. But in West Country at least, the servants wouldn’t have destroyed the nests. That was thought unlucky as ants were believed to be the souls of unbaptised babies. In Cornwall, ants were muryans or faery folk who went through a number of transformations, each time becoming smaller and smaller, the ant being their final form before they vanished from this world.

Christmas Rose, Black Hellebore

Photographer: Wildfeur

But the medieval gardener seldom wasted anything even if it was a pest, so in monasteries and nunneries which also had fish ponds and chickens, the servants would hang dead fish in the tree, and when they were covered with ants, take them down and toss them to the hens to feast on. In turn, these chickens not only provided fertiliser for the garden in the form of droppings, but also assisted with another vital form of fertiliser too, because the monks were bled for their health, usually four times a year, and blood taken from the monks was then put on the garden to feed the roses and fruit trees. To help them recover from the bleeding it was recommended they should be fed salted sage, parsley and chicken eggs. And during the three days’ rest after blood-letting, the monks were encouraged to sit in the gardens to recover their strength, especially in the Mary Garden, where the flowers and herbs would sooth their spirits and bodies.

To get prevent caterpillars from destroying plants in the wealthy houses, the servants would boil up a mixture of olive oil, bitumen and sulphur to paint the stems of the plants. In monasteries where labour was plentiful and free, boys would be sent out to pick caterpillars off at first light, or to shake the plants once the sun had gone down, so that the caterpillars fell off and being too cold to move would either die or be eaten.

Fly, Caterpillar, Pear and Centipede

c1591-1596

Slugs and snails could also be hand-picked. But ash and ground-up shells, both of which were often used as soil dressing, also discouraged slugs and snails, and olive oil could be used on stems, if you could afford it. But there were probably far fewer of these pests in the medieval garden, because of the much higher number of birds, voles and shrews, encouraged in part by that wonderful mixture of herbs and flowers in Our Lady’s Garden. Maybe our medieval forbears, knew better than us how to keep nature in balance.

'I gave birth to a rabbit' - by Karen Maitland

I was giving a book talk recently when I made an off-the-cuff joke about have read a ‘true life’ magazine containing an article titled – 'My daughter gave birth to a hamster.’ Inevitably someone asked me if there really had been such an article and I had to confess I’d just invented that title to illustrate a point, but I should have known that whatever a fiction writer dreams up, they discover that at some time in history it has actually happened. And just a few days after that talk, I came across a wonderful account from 1726, in which a woman claimed to have given birth, not to a hamster, but to 15 furry rabbits. You won’t be surprised to learn it was an audacious money-making scam, and one that intrigued me, since many characters in my medieval novels are scam artists of one kind of another.

In 1726, a local male midwife, John Howard, reported that Mary Toft, wife of a journeyman clothmaker in Godalming, Surrey, had given birth to several animal parts including three legs of a tabby cat, and over several days between 1st November and 6th had given birth to four rabbits, born dead, but which had been seen leaping vigorously in her belly prior to birth. This account so fascinated King George I that he sent the court anatomist, Nathaniel St André to investigate.

Mary Toft

Mary had continued to produce rabbits since the report, and St André had arrived in time to watch her give birth to her 15th bunny or bunny-part (depending on which account you read), which the anatomist claimed to be full-formed and about the age of a normal four month old rabbit. Over the course of the next few days, St Andre ‘heard’ the rabbits leaping in Mary’s abdomen and witnessed the birth of several dismembered pieces of rabbit. Having succeeded in persuading St Andre, the midwife, John Howard, and Mary Toft then asked for life-time pensions from the King for their successful, if unorthodox method of rabbit production.

The king, a trifle sceptical, dispatched the royal gynaecologist Sir Richard Manningham, who, after the application of a hot towel, witnessed the violent jerking in Mary’s stomach, but this time Mary gave birth to part of a pig’s belly which was a birth too far for Manningham. He had the wisdom to move Mary to Mrs Lacy’s bagnio in London, where he could keep a close eye on her. A bagnio was a bath-house and women often there went to give birth because of the soothing effects of the hot water.

Unfortunately for Mary, the whole scam unravelled on 4th December when Mrs Lacy’s porter reported that she had asked him to buy a rabbit for her. Several villagers back in Godalming then admitted that they had supplied rabbits to her around the time she was giving birth, and she finally admitted she’d set up the whole thing to obtain money from visitors, as well as the hoped-for pension, though she blamed everyone one she could think of, including a gypsy and the midwife, for putting her up to it.

A contemporary cartoon of Mary Toft giving birth to rabbits

But the time the hoax was revealed, so many eminent physicians had become involved that as the reports of what this woman had seeming given birth to became wilder, the whole affair brought great ridicule to the medical profession, with sceptics like William Hogarth openly mocking their gullibility. Many professional reputations were ruined as a consequence.

It is interesting that Mary Toft chose rabbits which, in paintings, were sometimes depicted in the birth scenes of both Jesus and the birth of his mother. As well as being regarded as a symbol of fertility and the rabbit is also curiously a symbol of virginity and the mystery of the Incarnation, because rabbits can conceive a second litter while still pregnant with the first, so it was believed they could give birth without sex.

Vittore Capaccio - 'Birth of the Virgin Mary' 

Mary Toft might also have been inspired in her scam by the persistent rumours that had circulated for a few decades concerning the son of King James II who was born to his wife Mary of Modena in 1688. When she suddenly fell pregnant after years of childlessness, even the testimony of the 42 witnesses called in to verify the birth of the James Francis Edward in 1688 at St James's Palace, could not counter the rumours that the baby had been smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming pan or through a secret door in the bedhead. King James and his wife claimed they had conceived thanks to the ‘magic waters’ at Holywell, but the boy never became king and William of Orange seized the throne shortly after.

It was certainly not the first time that such rumours circulated about noble or royal heirs, so perhaps we can’t entirely blame commoners for getting inspired to do a little birth-room smuggling of their own. Besides, you’ve only got to read Greek mythology and even English folktales to realise that legend claims women have given birth to some pretty strange creatures. Just imagine being Pasiphae and giving birth to the Minotaur. If Mary Toft had managed to fake that birth she might even have got her pension.

Pasiphae nursing the infant Minotaur