FIG. 1. Drawing, 1429, Clément de Fauquembergue. A clerk’s doodle in the margin of Paris’s parliamentary record is the single extant contemporaneous image of Joan of Arc. Likenesses made in her lifetime were destroyed upon her being condemned as a witch, rendering them dangerous devil’s currency.
FIG. 2. Miniature, fifteenth century, artist unknown. Having protected Joan’s modesty by leaving her legs out of the image’s frame, the artist feminizes her armor into an impregnable steel bodice and peplum that emphasize a woman’s build.
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.
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.
FIG. 26. “Joan Outside the Gates of Paris,” Vigiles du roi Charles VII, 1493, Martial d’Auvergne. A demure androgyne with a man’s torso grafted onto a woman’s hidden hips and legs, Joan contemplates action she is not dressed to join.
FIG. 27. Joan of Arc, 1948, Victor Fleming. Maxwell Anderson’s romantic script ignores the capture of Joan (Ingrid Bergman) at Compièigne. The prayers she offers when free, costumed as though she were a priest, deliver her directly into English captivity and the martyrdom that awaits her.
FIG. 28. The Messenger, 1999, Luc Besson. Vanquished, Joan (Milla Jovovich) falls not into the enemy’s hands but into a mystical consummation with a Jesus only she can see.
FIG. 29. Rouen tower today. The keep in which Joan spent the last five months of her life, fettered in an unlit cell, was restored in the nineteenth century.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928, Carl Dreyer.
FIG. 30. The director captures the inquisitor Cauchon’s spirit, or lack thereof. (Eugene Silvain as Cauchon)
FIG. 31. Joan (Maria Falconetti), like Jesus, is mocked and crowned before being executed for blasphemy.
FIG. 32. As described by Matthew, “When they came to a place called Golgotha, they offered [Jesus] wine to drink, mingled with gall”—a sedative he refused. Here, as Joan is led to the stake, an old woman steps forward with water for the condemned.
FIG. 33. The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962, Robert Bresson. Joan’s executioner complained that her stake had been set too high for him to cast a rope around her neck and strangle her, a mercy routinely extended to those about to be burned. (Florence Delay as Joan)
FIG. 34. Joan the Woman, 1916, Cecil B. DeMille. The director does a handy job of uniting Joan’s nationalism with her piety, using light to nail her to a great fleur-de-lis.
FIG. 35. Jeanne d’Arc, 1900, Georges Méliès. Not even in his playful rendition can Joan (Jeanne d’Alcy) escape her messianic destiny.
FIG. 36. World War I poster, 1918, Haskell Coffin. Sword aloft, bathed in the light of her vocation, a rapturous Joan casts her eyes up toward heaven. As though glowing through the carapace of her armor, two orbs of light at the level of her hidden breasts suggest a female bosom that cannot be obscured by the trappings of war.
FIG. 37. Classics Illustrated comics cover, 1950. Shining armor and white horse, banner and sword, and a phallic leg sheathed in red: From medieval manuscript to comic book, Joan’s iconography remains consistent.