Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (62 page)

FIG. 3. Domrémy. The house in which Joan was born and lived until she was seventeen has been restored and is now maintained as a museum.

FIG. 4. The interior of Joan’s childhood home. Between the front door and the window is the hearth before which she sometimes slept.

FIG. 5.
Joan the Woman,
1916, Cecil B. DeMille. Though Joan (Geraldine Farrar) insisted she had never been a shepherdess, the urge to align her career with Jesus’s messianic trajectory has proved impossible to resist by artists in all media.

FIG. 6.
Joan of Arc,
1879, Jules Bastien-Lepage. Bastien-Lepage resolves the controversy around Joan’s angels by hanging them behind her, over her abandoned loom and out of her sight. Perhaps, the painter suggests, they are creatures of her imagination.

FIG. 7.
Yolande of Aragon,
fifteenth century, artist unknown. Yolande parades behind the future king of France, wearing the crown she would help Joan set on his head.

FIG. 8.
Joan of Arc Leaving Vaucouleurs,
Jean-Jacques Scherrer (1855–1916). Before setting out on her God-given mission, Joan pauses at the city gate. A spindle representing women’s menial work lies discarded in the foreground.

FIG. 9.
Joan the Maid,
1994, Jacques Rivette. Joan (Sandrine Bonnaire) uses the polished breastplate of a suit of armor for her first haircut, shearing off what the Apostle Paul said God had given women “for a covering” to preserve their modesty.

FIG. 10.
Charles VII,
c. 1450–1455, Jean Fouquet. The king’s portrait, as executed by the official court painter, confirms descriptions by his contemporaries, which were unanimous on the subject of his homeliness.

FIG. 11.
Joan of Arc,
1948, Victor Fleming. Though no portrait of La Trémoïlle (far right) exists, the director has remained faithful to contemporaneous chronicles that present him as an enormously fat, insidious, and successful manipulator of Charles. (From left to right: José Ferrer, Ingrid Bergman, Gene Lockhart)

FIG. 12.
Bascinet,
iron, fifteenth century. Tradition holds that this is the helmet worn by Joan at the lifting of the siege of Orléans. If not hers, it is typical of her time and place.

FIG. 13. Although Joan’s original standard and pennons have been lost, she described them (under interrogation) in sufficient detail to create these facsimiles.

FIG. 14. Orléans, woodcut, fifteenth century, artist unknown. The city of Orléans as it looked during Joan’s lifetime. The bridge across the Loire, heavily fortified on either side, was the scene of the final and decisive battle of the lifting of the siege.