The Infant of Brussels: the Manneken-Pis As Christ Child
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The Infant of Brussels: The Manneken-Pis as Christ Child Catherine Emerson Anyone who has visited Brussels, or received a postcard from that city, is likely to have encountered the Manneken-Pis, a bronze statue of a small boy, naked and doing what his somewhat vulgar name suggests (see opposite)1. Indeed, as a tourist fetish, the Manneken-Pis can be difficult to escape: miniature reproductions abound in souvenir shops surrounding the fountain and take forms as diverse as snow-shakers, corkscrews and key rings. In this context, it seems incongruous — maybe even somewhat blasphemous — to suggest that the Manneken- Pis has anything to do with images of the divine. If the Manneken-Pis is an icon at all, it might be seen as a cultural icon, inhabiting the same cultural space as Dracula or Elvis, both of whose costumes it occasionally wears. However, on closer examination, it seems that there are many parallels between the Manneken-Pis and images of the Christ Child, parallels which have been recognised reluctantly by earlier commentators. It is my belief that they arise because the form taken by the Manneken-Pis was shaped by representational conventions normally applied to the Christ Child. It is natural that this should have been the case: the Christ Child was overwhelmingly the most common form of infant portraiture in the Low Countries of the period, but the fact that the urinating fountain resembles representations of Jesus has resulted in its being treated as if it were a holy statue, and it has attracted a number of cultural practices more normally associated with religious icons. To understand this phenomenon, we have to examine what exactly the Manneken-Pis is. Although it looks like a piece of kitsch commissioned specially for the thousands of tourists who visit the fountain every year, take its picture and post it on their websites, it was actually produced in the early seventeenth century, apparently to 1. Manneken-Pis, comer of rue de l'Etuve and rue du Chêne, Brussels (Catherine Emerson). IJFrS 3 (2003) 96 EMERSON replace an earlier stone statue.2 A number of almost transparently apocryphal stories have grown up to explain the unusual form taken by the statue, which appear in various versions copied from each other or poorly translated on the same websites. Thus, the Manneken is said to represent a child cursed to perpetual urination by a witch against whose door he had performed the same act or he is a commemoration of another child, an altar boy who absented himself from his place at the head of a holy procession to answer a call of nature and found himself miraculously unable to stop weeing for the half hour that it took for the procession to pass.3 Alternatively, he may be the infant son of a twelfth- century duke of Brabant, believed to have brought about a famous victory by inspiring his father's troops from the cradle, showing their enemies the contempt they deserved, or the son of a rich merchant who had got himself lost and whose father built a fountain commemorating the position in which he was found. This multiplicity of tall tales surrounding the Manneken-Pis might suggest that we should regard any piece of information regarding the child with scepticism. Nevertheless, the belief that the seventeenth-century statue replaced an earlier one seems justified. Indeed, 'dMenneken pist' was already a landmark in Brussels in 1453, when it formed the boundary between two administrative districts.4 Other appearances of the same visual motif in the fifteenth century suggest that it had a significance which extended beyond the city limits of Brussels into the surrounding region. In 1454 a model of a boy urinating rosewater was one of the table decorations at a banquet in Lille held by the duke of Burgundy to promote interest in a crusade.5 The following year, the worthies of the town of Geraardsbergen ordered a fountain in the same form to place 2. Henne, Alexandre & Wauters, Alphonse, Histoire de la ville de Bruxelles, 3 vols. (Brussels, Librairie encyclopédique de Perichon, 1845) III, p. 159, says that the statue was commissioned on 13th August 1619, adding that previous historians had erroneously given the date as 1648. With the advent of the internet, the date has been transposed to 1691, and reproduced on multiple websites. 3. These, and other, legends are also discussed in print; see Histoire et origine de Manneken-Pis suivie de l'historique de la Place des Martyrs, de l'Eglise de Ste Gudule et de l'Hôtel-de-VUle (Brussels, Verrassel-Charvet, 1846?) pp. 13-16. 4. Laurent, René, 'L'Acte de 1453 concernant les limites des quartiers à Bruxelles', in Despy, G., M.-A. Arnould & M. Martens (eds.), Hommage au Professeur Paul Bonenfant (Brussels, Universa, 1965) pp. 467-78 (477). 5. De La Marche, Olivier, Mémoires, éd. Henri Beaune & Jean d'Arbaumont, 4 vols. (Paris, Société de l'Histoire de France, 1883-88) II, p. 349. THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 97 in front of their town hall.6 Similar fountains appear in accounts of civic ceremonies of the fourteenth century and there is some indication that the Brussels statuette dates from this period: records in the city archives refer to something called the 'Juliaensken Borre', the fountain of wee Julian, another name for the Manneken-Pis being 'le petit Julien'. If the Manneken-Pis dates back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, it is all the more significant that its appearance bears close comparison to devotional statues of the Christ Child produced around the same time. These were popular devotional objects of the period and remain so — particularly in Germany and Central Europe where the example best known in Ireland, the Child of Prague, has a home. Although we generally see these figures clothed, most of them are in fact statuettes of naked children under their vestments (see following pages) and, in this state, do not look dissimilar from the Manneken-Pis. Indeed, this resemblance should not surprise us as the area around Brussels was an important centre of production for images of the infant Jesus and produced a characteristic style, typified by their ringlets and smiling faces, which are shared by the Manneken-Pis.7 Of course, the form taken by the current fountain dates from the seventeenth century and, as such, looks a lot like Italian putti of the period.8 In fact, putti themselves owed a lot to the influence of Low Countries religious imagery. François Du Quesnoy, brother of Jérôme Du Quesnoy, the sculptor who produced the seventeenth-century bronze Manneken-Pis, was sculptor to Urban VHJ and excelled in child portraiture, producing a variety of animated child figures.9 François Du Quesnoy's stone children were influential in shaping the subsequent putti tradition. Although not explicitly portrayals of the infant Jesus, they were almost 6. Cock, M. & R. van Damme, Het Manneken-Pis te Geraardsbergen. Een kritischhistorische studie over zijn ontstaan (Geraardsbergen, Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde, Afdeling Geraardsbergen, 1972). An updated version of the same work is available as a booklet from the Manneken- Pismuseum, Geraardsbergen, and on the website Manneken Pis van Geraardsbergen: http://home.tiscali.be/manneken-pis/startpagina.html 7. See Wenzel, Hans, 'Christkind', in Gall, Ernst & Heydenreich, L. H. (eds), Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, III (Stuttgart, Alfred Druckenmuller, 1954) pp. 590-608 (593). 8. The fountain currently on display is actually a nineteenth-century copy of Du Quesnoy's statue, which was damaged when it was stolen by an ex-convict. The original bronze statue is on display at the Musée de la ville de Bruxelles. 9. Fransolet, Mariette, François du Quesnoy sculpteur d'Urbain VIII1597-1643 (Brussels, Palais des Académies, 1942) pp. 51-2. EMERSON •»v » *»* H ï , ''*'^L,' ....'^WX^!'!« * """ .,.wr THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 100 EMERSON invariably invested with spiritual significance by virtue of their appearing on funeral monuments as part of religious tableaux. Thus, it should not be thought unusual if François Du Quesnoy's statues draw upon the earlier Low Countries traditions relating to the portrayal of Jesus. Indeed, art historians work on the presumption that artists produced similar styles of child portraiture when creating secular objects and when portraying the infant Jesus. Thus, an otherwise anonymous sixteenth-century bronze Christ Child in the Victoria and Albert museum in London is attributed to the foundry of Pankraz Labenwolf because, in both outward appearance and in what can be discerned of the way it was made, it resembles a Munich statue known to have been produced by Labenwolf himself.10 In the same way, it seems reasonable to conclude that the appearance of another bronze statue, that of the Manneken-Pis, should also have been shaped by representational conventions traditionally applied to the Christ Child. And there are some strange parallels between the figures of the Christ Child and that of the Manneken-Pis. The infant Jesus typically has his right hand raised in blessing while his left hand holds some object symbolising one of the attributes of Christ (see opposite)11, frequently a globe — particularly in more recent representations — but also an olive branch, and, especially in the earliest figures, a dove or other bird. Now, the Manneken-Pis holds his penis in his left hand, which is understandable within the terms of the iconography of the Christ Child — who would always hold a profane object in his left hand, the right hand being reserved for the holy act of blessing. No infant statue — particularly not one based upon representations of the divine — could be caught using his right hand to pee.