The Unseen Servant (original) (raw)

2022, in “We are all servants”: The Diversity of Service in Premodern Europe 1000-1700

A spell for bards, wizards, and warlocks, advertised on the web, promises to conjure up an unseen servant, "an invisible, mindless, shapeless force that performs simple tasks at your command. " 1 Numerous publications, including some in this volume, have shown that sometimes close relationships arose between master and servant. 2 But the ideal of the unseen servant also has a long history, reaching back to medieval and early modern art and architecture. If employers were fond of their servants, they rarely commissioned art that visualized this. Instead most images of servants depict them either as negative foils for the master or mistress or as secondary figures who are pushed to the side, cut off by the frame, overlapped by other figures, cast in shadow, seen from the back, or otherwise represented as of little importance. 3 Furthermore, when the patrician class wanted at times to display a large assembly of servants wearing livery or the lord's emblems as a sign of their wealth, status, or magnificence, this display rarely included the low status workers who washed the dishes, scrubbed the floors, emptied the chamber pots, and lugged water or firewood up and down stairs. One ideal was to keep such servants "far from the eyes, ears, and nostrils of household owners, " as Guido Guerzoni puts it. 4 This essay explores French, German, Italian, Dutch, English, and Flemish images from the twelfth through the seventeenth century that portray the servant as invisible. The first part examines how servants' physical labour was rarely visualized, and, when it was depicted, it was shown through a visual code. The second part demonstrates how wages were generally not represented, even when the accompanying text mentions them. 1 https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Unseen%20Servant#content. Accessed 1 June 2020. I would like to thank Isabelle Cochelin for including me in the conference that she organized, inviting me to co-edit this volume, and for her invaluable comments on an earlier version of this article. This essay developed from my forthcoming book, titled Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700, under contract to Yale University Press. 2 See, for example, the essays by Laumonier and Couling in this volume. 3 For exceptions to this rule, see my forthcoming book cited in note 1.