Le petit cheval d'or

Like his father, Charles VI had his store of precious objects carefully inventoried. The listing with short descriptions of the gorgeous items in his possession drawn up in around 1405 includes the magnificent statue commonly known as the Petit cheval d’or—or the Goldenes Rossl, because it has resided in Germany since about 1410.

an image of Our Lady who is holding her child, seated in a garden, done after the manner of a trellis, and Our Lady is enamelled in white and the child in rouge cler and the said image has a brooch at her neck, decorated with six pearls and a ballas ruby and over the head of Our Lady is a crown decorated with two ballas rubies and a sapphire and 16 pearls, and holding the said crown are two small angels enamelled in white and the said garden [is] decorated with five ballas rubies and five sapphires and 32 pearls and there is a lectern where there is a book and this is decorated with 12 pearls, and in front of the image there are three images of gold, that is Saint Catherine, Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, and below the image of the king, kneeling on a cushion decorated with four pearls, wearing the arms of France. And in front of him his book on a stool of gold and behind him a tiger, and in front of the king on the other side a knight, enamelled in white and blue, who holds the golden helmet of the king, and below there is a horse enamelled in white with the saddle and harness of gold and a valet enamelled in white and blue who holds in one hand the bridle and in the other hand a baton, and this weighs about 18 marcs of gold and the base on which these things are set weighs around 30 marcs of silver gilt, and it was given by the Queen to the King the first day of the new year 1404 [1405 new style]. ^[279]

The vast majority of precious objects exchanged among the Valois have disap­peared, melted down and reworked, but this rare example offers insight into the intensely political and, simultaneously, personal, relationships that the exchange of etrennes served to shape and reinforce.

Typically a married couple was depicted in prayer in a donor portrait. Isabeau’s omission from the Petit cheval d’or therefore seems strange. Indeed, a similar no-longer-extant object manifesting a similar theme, described in the same account in which the Petit cheval d’or is entered, included the queen beside the king.^[284] And yet, perhaps the queen is not entirely absent from the Petit cheval d’or. Perhaps she meant to associate herself implicitly with the Virgin. The statue would have encouraged the real Charles VI, practicing private devotion with the object, to think about her when he gazed at the Virgin. The figure of Charles VI has just taken a break from his travels on horseback for a moment of prayer, a pause that can be interpreted metaphorically as the king’s halting in the midst of his travails, physical or mental, to reflect on his situation. The political situa­tion going into 1405 was especially difficult, as we have seen: Jean sans Peur had recently become Duke of Burgundy and was trying to appropriate for himself a major role in the government. This etrenne, with its Virgin crowned by angels, refers back to the optimistic period of Isabeau’s 1389 crowning by angels during her entry into Paris and reminds Charles in symbolic language of the queen’s commitment to watch over him and the kingdom.

Also suggestive, the Virgin is surrounded with child-saints whose names recalled those of two of the king and queen’s own children: Jean and Catherine, born in 1398 and 1401.

The Petit cheval d’or seems to make material the argument by which Isabeau and her supporters authorized her position in the government. Although Queen of Heaven, Marie was necessarily co-ruler with her son, never an all-powerful regent. With the incessant disputes over power during the king’s absences con­stantly threatening to explode into outright war, the etrenne reminds Charles that peace depends on a female mediator, a woman surrounded by children, holding the true ruler on her knee. Certainly the figure represents the Virgin Mary, not Isabeau, but in a climate where the figure of mediator so persistently partook of the earthly and the divine and in a kingdom where the problem of regency was so acute, a figure of the Virgin co-reigning with her son could not have helped but evoke the queen.

In addition to reminding us of the personal nature of gifts the Petit cheval d’or also embodies one of the more mundane purposes of such gifts. Shortly after receiving the object, Charles VI passed it on, at the request of the queen, to her brother, Louis of Bavaria, as a guarantee of payment of the 120,000 francs that the king had accorded Louis on his marriage to Anne of Bourbon.^[286] The Petit cheval d’or therefore ended up in Bavaria, where it remains to this day.^[287] Fabulous wealth monopolized by a tiny elite is a problem that continues to plague modern societies, and my point in this chapter has been neither to justify the economic organization of a gift-giving society nor what might be taken as its modern coun­terpart, crony capitalism. Rather, I restore Isabeau’s jewels to their proper context, the same one that gives meaning to the beautiful objects collected and exchanged by contemporary male royalty and nobility.

clue to Blanche’s role [,..] may be found in the nature of what she bought — here, especially, jewels, which apparently were accumulated with some regular­ity by both the king and the queen for the queen’s household. What were these jewels for? No doubt some were destined for the adornment of both persons and objets d’art, but probably many, if not most, were intended to be used as gifts that would bind the recipient to the giver — the queen...^[288]

Surely Isabeau of Bavaria’s accounts tell a similar story. Although Nicola Tallis’s study of queens’ jewelry 1445—1548 focuses on queens consort of England, the conclusion that the gems worn by these queens mirrored their status and rendered visual their authority is true of Isabeau as well. And, as demonstrated by recent scholarship, including Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben’s vol­ume on female households and Barbara Stephenson’s study of the patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (1492—1549)^[289], women, like men, created communities upon whose members they drew for support through strategic gift-giving.^[290] But whereas results of the practice are in general relatively visible for men, in the form of offices and territories awarded or alliances in war, such female activity is often invisible to historians, because women so often exerted influence indirectly. The activity therefore tends to be difficult to recover, as Kettering has noted.^[291]

When the intermittent insanity of the king required Isabeau to assume important roles to hold the kingdom together, she sought to reinforce her polit­ical clout, and one means of doing this was to amass a store of jewels sufficient to support her participation in the exchange of gifts. Isabeau’s status as patron at the Valois court and her political role during a time when political and private interests were virtually inextricable require us to consider her jewels as part of a political strategy.