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

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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 righthan d 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 righthan d to pee. So the left hand, the one normally given to holding a bird or a globe, receives the penis of the Manneken-Pis. Indeed, we could go

10. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inventory number 411-1854. The Christ Child has been attributed to Labenwolf 'because of its close resemblance to the bronze statuette of a boy surmounting the fountain in the courtyard of Nuremberg Town Hall signed by Pankraz Labenwolf in 1556 [...]. The wooden model for the statuette of the Town Hall fountain survives in the museum at Nuremberg, and the Christ Child shows all the signs of having been cast from a wooden model.' 11. Infant of Prague, dressed in one of its many costumes (http://www.karmel.at/prag-jesu/ reproduced with the permission of Jiri Ledvinka). THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 101

further in acknowledging that terms for birds have been used throughout Europe and across the centuries as slang words to designate the penis. Spanish, Catalan and Italian all use words for little in this way {pajarito in Spanish and Catalan, uccello in Italian), and the Petit Robert attributes the uncertain etymology of the modern term zizi to a deformation of oisiau. In 2001 the Canadian magazine Today's Parent advised that 'bird' is an acceptable pet name for your son's penis whilst the fifteenth-century German Malleus Maleficarum presents us with a number of narratives in which witches remove the members of men 102 EMERSON who have angered them and place them in birds' nests.12 Given this widespread association between a bird and a penis, we could see the substitution of the bird in the left hand of the Christ Child with the penis in that of the Manneken-Pis as a development from existing Christian iconography. This reading has further implications when we consider the role of the bird (or globe, or olive branch) in the portrayal of Jesus. It is an attribute, that is to say it tells us what aspect of the infant is being singled out for devotion, be it Jesus the Saviour of the world, the bringer of peace, the source of the Holy Spirit and so on. While the right hand displays the sign of blessing, the very universality of this gesture amongst statues of the Holy Child means that we look to the left hand in order to see how we should read the statue. Frequently this reading also leads to the naming of the statue and this seems to have been the case with the Manneken-Pis. Whether he develops from a conscious linguistic subversion of Christie portraiture or merely draws on its aesthetics, this convention of looking at the left hand to provide a clue as to the essence of the statue and its name certainly appertains where 'le petit Julien' has become 'le Manneken- Pis'. Indeed, Marc Lanval, a Brussels psychosociologist writing in 1953, argues that 'petit Julien' is already an essentialising epithet, arising from the fact that Toujours est-il que l'implication phallique du mot Julius est incontestable. Après avoir désigné populairement le membre viril lui-même, d'où Juliaanken = petit phallus, le mot « Jules » dans le dialecte bruxellois d'aujourd'hui, signifie toujours « vase-de- nuit ». La filiation ne fait aucun doute. Mais, comme pour la masse et surtout pour les visiteurs, le nom de Juliaanken n'était ni assez direct, ni assez évocateur, le vocable « Manneken-Pis », né vers le

12. Kramer, Heinrich & James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans, with an introduction by Montague Summers (New York, Dover, 1928, reprinted in replica edition 1971) p. 121: 'And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? [...] [A] certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to the parish priest.' THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 103

moment où le souvenir de la précarité de l'eau potable se perd, a remplacé l'ancien nom aujourd'hui complètement oublié." Certainly the popularity of the Manneken-Pis as a tourist souvenir is especially notable and it can be seen as a secular version of the medieval phenomenon whereby travellers from Germany would purchase a Low Countries Christ Child either to install in their own home or to present to their local church. Medieval devotion to the infant Jesus took a number of forms which can seem peculiar if not disturbing to modern eyes. The Christ Child was a popular figure in houses of nuns. In this feminine environment, some of whose members at least had entered the cloister for societal reasons rather than because they had a vocation, the figure of the Christ Child lost some of its religious potency and became more infantilised. One group of sisters reported seeing their statue of the infant saviour running after them as they left the convent, scared to be left alone, while another nun, the fourteenth-century mystic Margarethe Ebner, who slept with her figurine of the Christ Child, as with a favoured doll or teddy bear, had a vision of the infant clamouring at her breast to be suckled, a request she acceded to in exchange for the child's blessing.14 In both these incidents the vulnerability of the child is central to the reaction that it provokes in its carers. Indeed, this vulnerability was perhaps in the forefront of the minds of those who came into contact with medieval figures of the Christ Child because they were usually naked. It might be thought that another, less troubling, devotional practice — that of clothing religious statues — might result from the vulnerable nudity of the figure of the Christ Child. In fact it seems that the reverse is the case: the knowledge that the figure was to be clothed led artisans to produce naked figurines. This theory is supported by the fact that many later statues were produced with moveable arms to facilitate dressing. Similarly, Manneken-Pis is naked and is clothed in many ways that recall devotional practices applied to figures of the Infant Jesus. This might seem a strange claim to make given that the Manneken-Pis is not simply clothed but dressed up in costumes as

13. Lanval, Marc, L'Enigme du Manneken-Pis, illustrations de Frans Sterckx (Brussels, Editions du Laurier, 1953) p. 18. 14. Dupeux, Cécile, Peter Jetler & Jean Wirth (eds.), Iconoclasme. Vie et mort de l'image médiévale (Berne, Somogy, 2001) p. 267. 104 EMERSON diverse as Santa, a Japanese samurai, a suit made of condoms to celebrate World AIDS day and, of course, Mickey Mouse. The various representations of the Christ Child, on the other hand, are always dressed as Jesus. Nevertheless, even within the scope of the brief 'dressed as Jesus', there are a number of different approaches that one can take and different statues find themselves dressed as Christ the King, Christ the pauper or Christ, the Good Shepherd. Moreover, many of the customs surrounding the clothing of a Christ Child parallel closely those relating to the Manneken-Pis. The Infant of Prague, probably made in Spain and unusual for having been sculpted with a wax undergarment as part of his body, only ever plays the part of Christ the King. Nevertheless, he wears a number of different regional and national costumes, presented by visiting dignitaries and congregations across the world. Similarly, the Manneken-Pis wears a range of national, regional and tribal costumes, many donated to mark the visit of a VIP or group from that community. What is more, both the Manneken-Pis and the Infant of Prague have received military honours. In 1747 a group of French grenadiers who had entered Brussels with Louis XV stole the Manneken-Pis, abandoning it at the door of a bar, an event which provoked civic unrest. The soldiers were punished and the French king awarded the statue the order of Saint Louis, with a costume to match. Not only did this award follow in the already established tradition of presenting costumes to the statue (the first documented gift having occurred in 1698) but it had the effect of making the statue the military superior of the French troops, who had to salute it in passing.15 Nor is this the only military honour that the Manneken is said to have received. He was also reportedly made an honorary Master Sergeant of the US Marine Corps, a distinction bestowed by Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, to mark the liberation of Brussels after the Second World War.16 As for the Infant of Prague, he was presented with a miniature replica of the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece when it was bestowed on his protector Count Bernard Ignatius of Martinic in the late seventeenth century.17 It is likely similar distinctions have been accorded to other

15. Henne & Wauters, op. cit., tells this story, but suggests that the bestowal of military orders on the statuette may be an apocryphal tale (vol. H, p. 272). 16. This story is to be found on the website Brussels Barbarians Rugby FC — The Origins of the Manneken Pis: http://www.angelfire.com/trek/bbrfc/mpis.html 17. Forbelsk, Josef, Jan Royt, Mojmir Horyna, The Holy Infant of Prague, trans, by Katerina Hilskâ (Prague, Aventium, 1992) p. 54. THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 105 statues, both religious and secular but, perhaps understandably, neither awarding bodies nor owners of such statues are particularly keen to draw attention to these awards, and this is a line of enquiry which needs further illumination. Admitting the Infant of Prague and the Manneken-Pis to your order could be said to have very different cultural meanings — invoking divine protection in the first case and populist credibility in the second. However, in each case the behaviour of those making the award is almost identical. The close parallels between reactions to the Manneken-Pis and those engendered by the Christ Child may have been triggered by the physical resemblance of the Brussels fountain to an infant Jesus which may in turn arise from the fact that this was the only representational norm available to his sculptor. Yet the question remains as to whether those who treat the Manneken-Pis thus do so with a conscious belief that he is a religious object. Here the evidence is equivocal. It is a commonplace of tourism scholarship that pilgrimages represent a medieval form of tourism (a reading which is supported by a wealth of medieval literature from Chaucer's celebration of the attractions of a pilgrimage in late spring to the author of the Quinze Joy es de Mariage's cynical portrayal of the wife who affects religious devotion in order to get herself a holiday).18 In this respect the Manneken-Pis occupies the same cultural space as a tourist attraction that holy statues and relics did for the medieval traveller (and indeed, for the modern visitor to Brussels who may well take in both the Manneken-Pis and the Black Madonna in the nearby church of Saint Catherine).19 Despite this, the fact that the fountain occupies this

18. De La Salle, Antoine, Les Quinze joies de mariage, éd. Jean Rychner (Geneva, Droz, 1963) joie 8. 19. An interesting example of this sort of travel literature, in which the Manneken- Pis is found in the company of other more conventional devotional sculpture, can be seen in Boyce, Edmund, The Belgian Traveller: being a complete guide through Belgium and Holland or Kingdom of the United Netherlands containing a full description of every town; its objects of curiosity, manufactures, commerce and inns; the mode of conveyance from place to place; and a complete itinerary of the surrounding country, to which is prefixed a brief sketch of the history, constitution and religion of the Netherlands, the general appearance, productions and commerce of the country; and the manners and customs of the inhabitants. Fourth edition considerably enlarged and improved (London, Samuel Leigh, 1823). Boyce concentrates particularly on the work of the sculptor Du Quesnoy, and describes the Manneken-Pis alongside his religious art in Notre-Dame-de-la-Chapelle and in the place St-Michel. 106 EMERSON

space does not mean that he is perceived as doing so. Nevertheless, there are indications that this has been the case, at least for some observers and at some periods. Collin de Plancy, the author of an 1824 history of the Manneken- Pis ('racontée par lui-même' but accompanied by a commentary written in Collin de Plancy's own name) raises the question as to whether the statue can be regarded as a representation of Jesus because of the story of the lost infant found again by his parents which is attached to the fountain and can be compared to that of Jesus found preaching in the temple after going astray. Collin de Plancy rejects this reading because 'la manière dont ses parents le retrouvèrent n'a aucun rapport avec l'origine de notre fontaine'.20 A subsequent anonymous author probably rewriting the same material cast aside the hypothesis with even greater vehemence calling it 'irrévérencieux et dénué de sens commun'.21 The fact that both writers reject the suggestion does not negate the significance of their having identified a similarity between the Manneken-Pis and the Christ Child, and we might speculate that the story of the lost boy has attached itself to the fountain precisely because this is one of the few episodes from Jesus's early childhood that the gospels provide. Another episode from the history of the Manneken-Pis is still more suggestive when it comes to determining whether or not the treatment of the urinating statue was consciously treated as if it were the baby Jesus. In 1792 French revolutionary troops entered Brussels with consequences that still make themselves felt in Brussels archives. The better manuscripts of the Brussels libraries found their way into the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the proceedings of the Brussels academies went unpublished for several years. One event which came to be commemorated widely in popular song was the placing by the French troops of a red revolutionary hat on the head of the Manneken- Pis. This was interpreted as an insult by both French- and Dutch- speaking inhabitants of the city whose songs register their outrage and celebrate the liberation of the statue from this indignity.22 Nevertheless,

20. Histoire du Manneken-Pis racontée par lui-même et publiée par Collin de Plancy avec des Appendices (Brussels, Arnold Lacrosse, 1824) p. 108. 21. Histoire et origine de Manneken-Pis, p. 17. 22. Liedeken van het Manneken-Pis, over het op-stellen van eene Jacobine-Mutse op zyn hooft (Brussels?, 1793?); Chanson du Manneken-Pis (Brussels?, 1793?), both pamphlets are to be found in the British Library. THE INFANT OF BRUSSELS 107 insulting the populace of Brussels was not necessarily the intention of the troops who had clothed the fountain. There are other incidents of hats being placed on public buildings and statues during the revolutionary period which are subject to other interpretations. In Strasbourg, where public monuments were particularly targeted by iconoclasts where it was felt that they celebrated anti-revolutionary ideals such as religion or monarchy, there seems to have been at least two such incidents. In one, a statue believed to be of Saint Nicolas which stood outside the Protestant church dedicated to the saint had a bonnet placed on its head in an attempt, so the historian Jean-Frédéric Herrmann argues, to save it from the iconoclastic fervour.23 If this was the motivation, the attempt was fruitless and the statue was destroyed. A better-documented case occurred on 4th May 1794 when a large red- painted steel bonnet was hoisted to the top of the spire of the city's cathedral. This, however, does not seem to have been an attempt to protect the cathedral from iconoclasts but was rather an action by the iconoclasts themselves to appropriate the cathedral for their own ends and coincided with the destruction of many of the sculptures on the outside of the cathedral, which was renamed the Temple de la Raison and dedicated to the Revolutionary cult. Neither of these actions was explained at the time and so we cannot be sure that the placing of a red bonnet on the head of Saint Nicolas really did have a different significance for those who did it from that accorded to the decoration of the cathedral — or, indeed, what that significance was in either case. Was the bonnet intended to protect the monument from further harm and to preserve it for diose who valued its spiritual significance, or was it meant to rob the monument of that significance by associating it with revolutionary values inimical to it? Is it possible that the same act should have had a different meaning in different contexts and, whether or not this is the case, how should we read the episode of the red bonnet placed on the head of the Manneken-Pis? The evidence from Strasbourg suggests that bonnets were specifically given to monuments with religious associations and therefore that, when the French soldiers chose this specific treatment for the Manneken-Pis, they were treating it as a religious statue. A similar conclusion can be drawn from one of the earliest documented appearances of the urinating boy motif. In 1454 Philippe le Bon, duke of Burgundy held a banquet to awaken

23. Herrmann, Jean-Frédéric, Notices historiques, statistiques et littéraires sur la ville de Strasbourg, 2 vols (Strasbourg, Levrault, 1817-19) vol. I, p. 387. 108 EMERSON interest in a crusade that he wished to promote to recapture the town of Constantinople, which had fallen to a Turkish army in the previous year. As I have said, the urinating boy present at this celebration took the form of a table decoration delivering rose water to the present company. Because of the religious import of the festivities, many of the decorations had a religious subtext, although most were of an explicitly national or regional character, stressing the unity of the duke's diverse territories. There were three trestle tables bearing decorations, and the urinating child appeared on the medium-sized table, together with a church, a ship and a statue of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Burgundy. This was the table where religious iconography was most prominent and a visual link was created between the saint and the small child by the fact that both figurines took the form of fountains. I would argue that this presents the urinating boy as a national icon, comparable to Saint Andrew, and representing the Low Countries territories ruled by the duke of Burgundy, just as Saint Andrew represents the French ones. Simultaneously the Manneken-Pis takes his place amongst symbols of the church and travels to foreign lands which are central to the crusading message of the banquet. In the fifteenth century, as in the eighteenth, the wee boy, despite his seemingly undignified pose, appears to have been regarded as a credible religious symbol — an icon in more than just the secular sense of the word.

National University of Ireland, Galway