Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (63 page)

FIG. 15. Jean, Count of Dunois, fifteenth century, artist unknown. As the commander of Orleans’s struggling forces, Dunois expected Joan to prove more hindrance than help. When he resisted her God-given authority, she overcame his reservations with a demonstration of the power she claimed.

FIG. 16.
Vigiles du roi Charles VII,
1493, Martial d’Auvergne. Astride her white charger, an armored Joan brandishes her sword at the prostitutes following her army. The red fabric draped around her thigh echoes the sweep of the camp followers’ skirts and parts, like a labial curtain, to reveal her armored phallic leg.

FIG. 17.
John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford,
engraving, George Vertue (1684–1756). The third surviving son of England’s King Henry IV, Lancaster served as France’s regent for his nephew Henry VI, who assumed England’s throne as an infant.

FIG. 18.
Henry VI,
c. 1535, artist unknown. Henry was not yet eight years old when he became king of England on November 6, 1429. He assumed rule in 1437, endured bouts of insanity throughout his reign, and suffered a complete mental breakdown when England lost the Hundred Years War.

FIG. 19.
Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy,
Rogier van der Weyden (1399–1464). Pragmatic as it might have been, Burgundy’s traitorous alliance with England served the duke’s personal agenda as well. Philip’s father, John the Fearless, was assassinated by order of the dauphin Charles in 1419.

FIG. 20.
The Entrance of Joan of Arc into Orléans,
Jean-Jacques Scherrer (1855–1916). Slicing through the shadowed world of mortals, golden light from on high makes it clear: The army Joan leads is God’s.

FIG. 21.
Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII,
1851, Jean Ingres. Plate armor suggests rather than obscures Joan’s female form, preserving her femininity. Spaulders, or shoulder guards, converge into breasts over a wide-hipped steel peplum that covers her groin. A red skirt opens to reveal only so much of one armored leg.

FIG. 22.
Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII at Reims,
1889, Jules Eugène Lenepveu. A nippled, breast-like plate peeks out from under Joan’s gold surcoat, underscoring the gender of this warrior.

FIG. 23. Reims Cathedral today. A French king received his divine right to rule when anointed with the holy oil delivered by the Holy Spirit on the occasion of Clovis’s baptism in 496. The Sainte Ampoule containing the sacred oil was guarded within the cathedral.

FIG. 24.
Saint Joan,
1957, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Otto Preminger. Once in possession of the throne, Charles stymied Joan’s attempts to rejoin the war, testing her obedience. “It’s so dull afterward when there is no danger,” Joan (Jean Seberg) complains to Dunois (Richard Todd).

FIG. 25. Joan’s coat of arms. During the Middle Ages it was exceedingly rare for a peasant to be invited to join the French aristocracy. Even rarer was permission to use the fleur-de-lis, a symbol reserved for royalty.