![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Here's the eleven page term paper I wrote for Dr. Kelker's Northern Renaissance Art History. It's called "Manuscript Illumination in the Courts of the Burgundian Netherlands." Read it if you like that sort or thing... or if you need help falling asleep. XD Enjoy none-the-less!
Illumination in the Courts of the Burgundian Netherlands
For centuries, only the aristocracy and wealthy merchants of Europe were able to commission illuminated manuscripts, a fact that would not change even at the art form’s decline in the sixteenth century. However, the production of such manuscripts would change from a strictly monastic enterprise into the hands of artists. The dissemination of information would no longer be controlled entirely by the Church, and the types of manuscripts produced would venture out of religious writings and Greco-Roman texts and into contemporary secular literature and treatises. Illuminations went from being an element to showcase and highlight the text to becoming the major focal point of the manuscripts. As exploration of manuscript illumination continued, the styles in which they were created would evolve from simplistic to complex miniatures, aided by the patronage of the nobility. No place was this more evident than in the Valois court in Burgundy, which, by the mid-1400s, rivaled Paris as the center for manuscript illumination.
The Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and his successor Philip the Good, were patrons of the arts, including manuscript illumination. During the late fourteenth through the late fifteenth century, they ruled over the area of Europe known as the Burgundian Netherlands, containing Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Ghent, and other Low Countries. As political control over the region allowed for traveling to a variety of trading centers in their dominion, the Dukes of Burgundy commissioned works from a wide variety of artists. It was in Burgundy specifically that the illumination of manuscripts flourished. The Duke de Berry, brother of Philip the Bold, was an avid collector of books and patron to the arts. In the early fifteenth century, he commissioned a Book of Hours from Paul, Herman, and Jean Limbourg. The Limbourg brothers had been in the employ of the ducal court of Burgundy since their teen years and had become masters of illumination. The first Book of Hours they created for the Duke de Berry is known as the Belles Heures du Jean de France, Duc de Berry. One of the more intricate and beautifully handled pages depicts an Annunciation, rendered in inks, tempera, and gold leafing on vellum. The entire page is illustrated with a great attention to detail, an amazing feat for something inches smaller than a modern sheet of notebook paper. The Virgin Mary kneels at a small table/desk that is shaped like a cathedral complete with Gothic arches, which houses her texts for religious study. The Gothic cathedral motif to her desk is perhaps a metaphor for the new religion that will come with the birth of Jesus, which still carries the traditions of the Old Testament, represented by the books shelved within the desk. The archangel Gabriel has entered the room, bearing a small bouquet of lilies, but has not yet spoken. Gabriel greatly resembles Jan Van Eyck’s Gabriel from the Ghent Altarpiece in positioning and posture. Mary is turning towards him, her arms crossed over her chest as though hit by a sudden draft. The billowing scroll over the steeple-esque attachment to the cathedral-shaped desk suggests that Gabriel’s sudden entrance has at least stirred the air in the room. God the Father stands with a pair of angels on a small stone balcony built into the framework of the central image. He looks down at Mary, guiding the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove to complete the Immaculate Conception. The figures exude the courtly style of art prevalent at the time with elegantly-dressed delicately-built figures, sumptuous draperies, and attempts at realistic perspective. The patterned floor tiles succeed in a realistic one-point perspective, but the cathedral-shaped desk is flattened and too narrow to be believable. The border of the piece which surrounds the central image is ornately decorated with images of musician angels, prophets foretelling the Annunciation, and soldiers. The colors of the elaborate border and the illuminated capital letters in the text are done in vibrant blues, reds, and gold, the colors of the Duke de Berry’s crest. Each page within the Belles Heures contains up to five hundred filigrees and foliage motifs, most done with gold leafing, which create a glowing, ethereal effect.
When the Belles Heures was completed in 1409, the Duke de Berry was quite satisfied and immediately commissioned an even more ambitious Book of Hours from the Limbourg brothers. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry has been called “the king of illuminated manuscripts” (Pognon, 12) and contains over two hundred full-page miniatures and over three hundred illuminated capital letters. Most famous from the Très Riches Heures is the section called the Labors of the Months, depicting specific scenes for each month and including a lunar calendar and the shift of the zodiac throughout the year. Each month is compositionally complex with patterns and levels of activity, particularly that of the January page. For January, the Duke de Berry sits at a New Year’s banquet. His status of wealth and power is discerned by the amount of gold, which could be a liquid asset in times of war, compiled throughout the piece along with the retinue of chevaliers on horseback and the large castle in the background. The Book of Hours remained unfinished and unbound by 1416 when, after seven years of work on the piece, all three Limbourg brothers and their patron died of unknown causes. Upon the Duke’s death, the Très Riches Heures was inherited by his cousin René de Anjou, King of Naples. Over the course of a century, various artists would be employed to try and complete the book. Most of the artists are unnamed except for the Master of Shadows, who worked on the piece after it came into René de Anjou’s possession and Jean Colombe after it was obtained by the House of Savoy in 1485.
The desire and esteem held for illuminated manuscripts in the fifteenth century eclipsed that of oil painting. An illuminated manuscript was even more of a luxury item and was a frequent choice when a gift was needed for a visiting dignitary. Some oil painters at the time worked not only on panel, but also illuminated manuscripts as well. While the viscosity of oil on panel lends itself to experience when working with the egg tempura on vellum of manuscript miniatures, the two mediums are quite different, and different skills are required for each. However, several artists did have successful careers as both oil painters and manuscript illuminators.
Jean Fouquet was court painter to King Louis XI of France and worked in both oils and manuscript illumination. Though his works do contain levels of imaginativeness and attentiveness to detail, Fouquet’s miniatures are more refined and more successful in their execution. In his Melune Diptych, St. Stephan presents Fouquet’s patron Etienne Chevalier to the Virgin Mary and Child on the left panel, and Mary sits enthroned and bare-breasted with Jesus on her lap while vividly-colored angels crowd the background on the right. The two pieces, when placed side-by-side, are not cohesive. While the rendering of the clothing and faces on the left panel are realistic, the right panel appears almost Mannerist in the anatomy of the figures, and the presentation of the subject matter is edging on Symbolist, like a William Blake painting. However, Fouquet’s miniatures are skillfully painted, such as in his The Right Hand of God Protecting the Faithful against Demons from the Hours of Etienne Chevalier. On a page less than eight inches tall, Fouquet accurately depicts a view of contemporary Paris with correct perspective and structure. The folds of the clothing and the faces of the faithful are discernable and individualistic. Fouquet, again, uses imaginative inventiveness when rendering the demons, almost comically, fleeing from the literal hand of God. The demons in coloring and shape resemble the cherub-esque angels in the Melune Diptych.
Simon Marmion was another artist who dipped his brush so-to-speak into both illuminating manuscripts and painting with oils. By the mid-1400s, he was being patronized by Philip the Good, grandson of Philip the Bold, and later by Philip the Good’s son Charles the Bold. Marmion was called the prince of illumination, though his rendering of correct anatomy was somewhat lacking and his use of tempera appears flat and bland when compared to the richness of the Limbourg brothers’ miniatures. For Philip the Good, he created his masterpiece the Grandes Chroniques de France, which covers the French royal dynasties from the Merovingian through the Direct Capetian, displaying the familial connections between the oldest French monarchs to the Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. It also contains the history of France as translated from Latin texts by the monks at Saint-Denis. Through the 1460s, Marmion continued to be commissioned by Charles the Bold and his wife Margaret of York. He produced several illuminated manuscripts for them, including The Visions of the Knight Tondal and a Breviary. In a page from the Breviary of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York entitled The Holy Virgins Greeted by Christ as They Enter the Gates to Paradise, there is an interesting spatial narrative. Instead of continuing the narrative throughout the piece continuously as seen in the January illumination from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures, Marmion employs a simple gold border which forms a gate shape to separate the three sections of the image. The first section depicts Christ, accompanied by two golden angels, speaking as the Holy Virgins hold hands in a circle around him. The second portion of the image, directly opposite to the first, shows Christ standing in front of an entrance way to a Gothic cathedral, the symbol of Gates of Heaven, the pathway to salvation. The third section, beneath the first two, illustrates the Holy Virgins in a discussion as a angel flies overhead. The final scene perhaps is metaphoric for religiosity and piousness not necessarily ending once one has reached Heaven, faithfulness as a continuous discourse even into eternity. While the composition is interestingly arranged and unique, the figures are repetitive, flat, and lack form. There is no illusion to an actual human body beneath the robes and draperies. The faces of the Holy Virgins do not vary; and while attempts at correct perspective are made, the piece does not successfully resolve it. The same problems can be seen in his miniatures for the Grandes Chroniques de France. In a scene from a page depicting Marmion himself presenting the bound manuscript to Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, the figures aware squashed and disjointed, awkwardly postured to fit in the small space, a rare occasion when the text is given slightly more importance than the images. In his oil paintings, in particular The Lamentation, his figures have slightly better proportion and have a healthy amount of negative space around them, allowing the viewer a more relaxed visual narrative throughout the piece. The positioning of Christ’s body as well as the face of John the Evangelist is very similar to that of Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. The Lamentation at least makes an attempt at individualizing the faces of the figures, and there is the illusion of an actual solid body existing underneath the heavy fabrics. The tonal quality to the piece is much greater when compared with The Holy Virgins miniature; there is a wider variety of hues and tints of the colors, and the use of shadow makes the figures more believable. One could wonder if it is because of the use of oils on The Lamentation that gives it its richness, or if Marmion had a greater skill with that medium over tempura on vellum. The backgrounds of both The Lamentation and The Holy Virgins are very similar and are arguably the richest elements of both pieces. The gradation of the sky from darkest to lightest shows a direct observation from the natural world.
Although known in China since the eighth century, wood blocks first made their appearance in Europe in the early fifteenth century and, along with the advent of the printing press and moveable type, helped pave the way for devotional books and images to be printed at a relatively low cost by the sixteenth century. These first wood blocks were simplistic and lacked finer definition of forms. While it may have been more cost effective to purchase a copy of a printed book, many aristocrats and the upper class of Europe still commissioned illuminated manuscripts. Though the time, effort, and large sums of money needed to produce an illuminated manuscript were inconvenient when compared to the new printed manuscripts, the art form itself continued to evolve in complexity and sophistication. Comparing woodblock prints to the illuminations of the later fifteenth/early sixteenth century is much like comparing the earliest Byzantium manuscripts to the works of the master illuminators of the Burgundian courts. In a parchment page depicting Saint Peter from a song book located in Naples from the late thirteenth century, the only illumination on the page was the first capital. Although the large initial P, which illustrates St. Peter’s martyrdom, is dominant on the page due to size and color, the majority of the page is reserved for the Romanesque musical scales. The figures of St. Peter and his executioners are cartoonish in their rendering with no attempt at believable anatomy or facial structure. It is very simplistic when compared with an illuminated manuscript of the sixteenth century. In the Adoration of the Magi, attributed to the Master of James IV of Scotland, text has been completely forsaken for the image. The figures are three-dimensional and modeled realistically, and the background is complex, stretching far off into the distance to a neighboring city. The changes in tone and the variety of colors is quite striking. Every element of the image has been given attention from the strange wood-grained pillars to the towers in the distance to the hay upon which the Virgin Mary sits. The meandering procession of people in the image is to allow a thoughtful meditation by the viewer on the journey of the three Magi to bring their gifts to the Christ child by slowly “exploring” the piece.
As the art form of manuscript illumination grew in complexity, it also continued to branch away from religious texts and into more secular works. René de Anjou, King of Naples and cousin of Philip the Good, was not only a patron of the arts, but an amateur painter himself. He was a poet and author, writing several books on ceremonies, rules of the tournament, and even an allegorical romance about his courtship of Jeanne de Laval, who would later become his wife, called “Conquest qu’un chevalier nomme le Cuer d’amour espris feist d’une dame appelee Doulce Mercy,” or Livre du cueur d’amour espris, which he had turned into an illuminated manuscript. In the story, a knight, accompanied by Desire, tries to win the heart of a lady named Dolce Merci by doing great deeds. The artist who illuminated the manuscript is unknown, but some have suggested that the Master of René de Anjou is perhaps René himself. While no works are specifically known to have been done by René, as an amateur painter, he would have been able to undertake creating an illuminated manuscript. It is possible that the artist is Barthélemy, a painter who had worked under Philip the Good’s patronage and traveled with René to Naples upon Philip’s death. The court records document Barthélemy as being René’s peintre et valet de chambre, a position held by the Limbourg brothers for the Duke de Berry and Jan Van Eyck for Philip the Bold. Barthélemy has several works attributed to him, the most generally accepted as his being the Aix Annunciation. If one were to look at the Aix Annunciation and then the page from Livre du cueur d’amour espris in which the Knight takes the lovesick king’s heart, there are some similarities. The treatment of the drapery on the king’s bed has the same techniques applied to Gabriel’s robes in the Aix Annunciation triptych. However, the knight’s wings are rendered quite differently than Gabriel’s, and the illumination as a whole is softer in appearance and has a greater attention to the shadows and lighting than the triptych. The only surviving illuminated work thought to be by Barthélemy is a Book of Hours done for René along with five miniatures. In a page depicting worshippers at a pagan temple from the text Théséide from the Book of Hours of René de Anjou, one can see a treatment to the fabric and the patterning behind the statuary that is repeated in the carpet and draperies in the illuminations from René’s Livre du cueur d’amour espris, but the treatment of the figures, however, is more sophisticated and the colors more vibrant and rich in the latter, suggesting that perhaps a different hand rendered it, possibly someone who studied under Barthélemy, perhaps even René himself. While it appears unlikely that Barthélemy was responsible for the illuminations of René’s romance, it is more likely that he is the mysterious Master of Shadows who attempted to complete illuminations from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures in the late-fifteenth century. The figures from Théséide and the December page from Très Riches Heures have similar top-heaviness in the men, and all the characters have individualistic features. The rending of the men’s pleated tunics is strikingly similar in both pieces. In other pages from Très Riches Heures, such as September, instead of a home of the Duke de Berry being shown, René’s chateau at Saumar is depicted, a place where René and likely his peintre et valet de chambre spent most of 1460, long after the Limbourg brothers and the Duke de Berry had passed away.
As manuscript illumination began to wane in popularity, Simon Bening emerged as the artist would bridge the dying illumination business into the new arena of miniature portraiture. Bening worked out of a workshop in Ghent, creating an elaborate Book of Hours. On a double-sided leaflet depicting September or October, peasants can be seen ploughing the fields and tending to their animals, a lush and verdant mountainside serving as a background. The figures, even those in the distance, are well-modeled and individualistic. Everything appears to be frozen in mid-motion, and one can understand that Bening had a keen sense of observation from the flicking of the horses’ tails to the change in atmospheric conditions in the furthermost mountains. However, there is no filigreed border filled with foliage or insects or birds; only a simple gold border stands, showcasing the image without distracting the viewer with outside material. Once known as the most famous illuminator of his day, Bening would become equally successful creating miniature portraits, such as his own self portrait from 1558. Bening captures the personality and individualism of himself as he does with his renderings of the peasants in his Book of Hours.
During the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, manuscript illumination flourished in the Burgundian courts. For those that could afford them, manuscripts with illuminations were treasured possessions, each unique to the artist who created the work and customized to the patron who desired it. Yet, even as manuscript illumination reached its golden age in sophistication, it could not compete with the cheaper, easier to produce, and more readily available printed books.
Bibliography
Calkins, Robert G. Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
De Hamel, Christopher. The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques. London: British Library, 2001.
Hindman, Sandra, et al. Illuminations. The Robert Lehman Collection, vol. 4. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997.
Parshall, Peter, and Rainer Schoch. Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Pognon, Edmond, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Liber, Geneva, 1987.
Illumination in the Courts of the Burgundian Netherlands
For centuries, only the aristocracy and wealthy merchants of Europe were able to commission illuminated manuscripts, a fact that would not change even at the art form’s decline in the sixteenth century. However, the production of such manuscripts would change from a strictly monastic enterprise into the hands of artists. The dissemination of information would no longer be controlled entirely by the Church, and the types of manuscripts produced would venture out of religious writings and Greco-Roman texts and into contemporary secular literature and treatises. Illuminations went from being an element to showcase and highlight the text to becoming the major focal point of the manuscripts. As exploration of manuscript illumination continued, the styles in which they were created would evolve from simplistic to complex miniatures, aided by the patronage of the nobility. No place was this more evident than in the Valois court in Burgundy, which, by the mid-1400s, rivaled Paris as the center for manuscript illumination.
The Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and his successor Philip the Good, were patrons of the arts, including manuscript illumination. During the late fourteenth through the late fifteenth century, they ruled over the area of Europe known as the Burgundian Netherlands, containing Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Ghent, and other Low Countries. As political control over the region allowed for traveling to a variety of trading centers in their dominion, the Dukes of Burgundy commissioned works from a wide variety of artists. It was in Burgundy specifically that the illumination of manuscripts flourished. The Duke de Berry, brother of Philip the Bold, was an avid collector of books and patron to the arts. In the early fifteenth century, he commissioned a Book of Hours from Paul, Herman, and Jean Limbourg. The Limbourg brothers had been in the employ of the ducal court of Burgundy since their teen years and had become masters of illumination. The first Book of Hours they created for the Duke de Berry is known as the Belles Heures du Jean de France, Duc de Berry. One of the more intricate and beautifully handled pages depicts an Annunciation, rendered in inks, tempera, and gold leafing on vellum. The entire page is illustrated with a great attention to detail, an amazing feat for something inches smaller than a modern sheet of notebook paper. The Virgin Mary kneels at a small table/desk that is shaped like a cathedral complete with Gothic arches, which houses her texts for religious study. The Gothic cathedral motif to her desk is perhaps a metaphor for the new religion that will come with the birth of Jesus, which still carries the traditions of the Old Testament, represented by the books shelved within the desk. The archangel Gabriel has entered the room, bearing a small bouquet of lilies, but has not yet spoken. Gabriel greatly resembles Jan Van Eyck’s Gabriel from the Ghent Altarpiece in positioning and posture. Mary is turning towards him, her arms crossed over her chest as though hit by a sudden draft. The billowing scroll over the steeple-esque attachment to the cathedral-shaped desk suggests that Gabriel’s sudden entrance has at least stirred the air in the room. God the Father stands with a pair of angels on a small stone balcony built into the framework of the central image. He looks down at Mary, guiding the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove to complete the Immaculate Conception. The figures exude the courtly style of art prevalent at the time with elegantly-dressed delicately-built figures, sumptuous draperies, and attempts at realistic perspective. The patterned floor tiles succeed in a realistic one-point perspective, but the cathedral-shaped desk is flattened and too narrow to be believable. The border of the piece which surrounds the central image is ornately decorated with images of musician angels, prophets foretelling the Annunciation, and soldiers. The colors of the elaborate border and the illuminated capital letters in the text are done in vibrant blues, reds, and gold, the colors of the Duke de Berry’s crest. Each page within the Belles Heures contains up to five hundred filigrees and foliage motifs, most done with gold leafing, which create a glowing, ethereal effect.
When the Belles Heures was completed in 1409, the Duke de Berry was quite satisfied and immediately commissioned an even more ambitious Book of Hours from the Limbourg brothers. The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry has been called “the king of illuminated manuscripts” (Pognon, 12) and contains over two hundred full-page miniatures and over three hundred illuminated capital letters. Most famous from the Très Riches Heures is the section called the Labors of the Months, depicting specific scenes for each month and including a lunar calendar and the shift of the zodiac throughout the year. Each month is compositionally complex with patterns and levels of activity, particularly that of the January page. For January, the Duke de Berry sits at a New Year’s banquet. His status of wealth and power is discerned by the amount of gold, which could be a liquid asset in times of war, compiled throughout the piece along with the retinue of chevaliers on horseback and the large castle in the background. The Book of Hours remained unfinished and unbound by 1416 when, after seven years of work on the piece, all three Limbourg brothers and their patron died of unknown causes. Upon the Duke’s death, the Très Riches Heures was inherited by his cousin René de Anjou, King of Naples. Over the course of a century, various artists would be employed to try and complete the book. Most of the artists are unnamed except for the Master of Shadows, who worked on the piece after it came into René de Anjou’s possession and Jean Colombe after it was obtained by the House of Savoy in 1485.
The desire and esteem held for illuminated manuscripts in the fifteenth century eclipsed that of oil painting. An illuminated manuscript was even more of a luxury item and was a frequent choice when a gift was needed for a visiting dignitary. Some oil painters at the time worked not only on panel, but also illuminated manuscripts as well. While the viscosity of oil on panel lends itself to experience when working with the egg tempura on vellum of manuscript miniatures, the two mediums are quite different, and different skills are required for each. However, several artists did have successful careers as both oil painters and manuscript illuminators.
Jean Fouquet was court painter to King Louis XI of France and worked in both oils and manuscript illumination. Though his works do contain levels of imaginativeness and attentiveness to detail, Fouquet’s miniatures are more refined and more successful in their execution. In his Melune Diptych, St. Stephan presents Fouquet’s patron Etienne Chevalier to the Virgin Mary and Child on the left panel, and Mary sits enthroned and bare-breasted with Jesus on her lap while vividly-colored angels crowd the background on the right. The two pieces, when placed side-by-side, are not cohesive. While the rendering of the clothing and faces on the left panel are realistic, the right panel appears almost Mannerist in the anatomy of the figures, and the presentation of the subject matter is edging on Symbolist, like a William Blake painting. However, Fouquet’s miniatures are skillfully painted, such as in his The Right Hand of God Protecting the Faithful against Demons from the Hours of Etienne Chevalier. On a page less than eight inches tall, Fouquet accurately depicts a view of contemporary Paris with correct perspective and structure. The folds of the clothing and the faces of the faithful are discernable and individualistic. Fouquet, again, uses imaginative inventiveness when rendering the demons, almost comically, fleeing from the literal hand of God. The demons in coloring and shape resemble the cherub-esque angels in the Melune Diptych.
Simon Marmion was another artist who dipped his brush so-to-speak into both illuminating manuscripts and painting with oils. By the mid-1400s, he was being patronized by Philip the Good, grandson of Philip the Bold, and later by Philip the Good’s son Charles the Bold. Marmion was called the prince of illumination, though his rendering of correct anatomy was somewhat lacking and his use of tempera appears flat and bland when compared to the richness of the Limbourg brothers’ miniatures. For Philip the Good, he created his masterpiece the Grandes Chroniques de France, which covers the French royal dynasties from the Merovingian through the Direct Capetian, displaying the familial connections between the oldest French monarchs to the Philip the Good and Charles the Bold. It also contains the history of France as translated from Latin texts by the monks at Saint-Denis. Through the 1460s, Marmion continued to be commissioned by Charles the Bold and his wife Margaret of York. He produced several illuminated manuscripts for them, including The Visions of the Knight Tondal and a Breviary. In a page from the Breviary of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York entitled The Holy Virgins Greeted by Christ as They Enter the Gates to Paradise, there is an interesting spatial narrative. Instead of continuing the narrative throughout the piece continuously as seen in the January illumination from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures, Marmion employs a simple gold border which forms a gate shape to separate the three sections of the image. The first section depicts Christ, accompanied by two golden angels, speaking as the Holy Virgins hold hands in a circle around him. The second portion of the image, directly opposite to the first, shows Christ standing in front of an entrance way to a Gothic cathedral, the symbol of Gates of Heaven, the pathway to salvation. The third section, beneath the first two, illustrates the Holy Virgins in a discussion as a angel flies overhead. The final scene perhaps is metaphoric for religiosity and piousness not necessarily ending once one has reached Heaven, faithfulness as a continuous discourse even into eternity. While the composition is interestingly arranged and unique, the figures are repetitive, flat, and lack form. There is no illusion to an actual human body beneath the robes and draperies. The faces of the Holy Virgins do not vary; and while attempts at correct perspective are made, the piece does not successfully resolve it. The same problems can be seen in his miniatures for the Grandes Chroniques de France. In a scene from a page depicting Marmion himself presenting the bound manuscript to Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, the figures aware squashed and disjointed, awkwardly postured to fit in the small space, a rare occasion when the text is given slightly more importance than the images. In his oil paintings, in particular The Lamentation, his figures have slightly better proportion and have a healthy amount of negative space around them, allowing the viewer a more relaxed visual narrative throughout the piece. The positioning of Christ’s body as well as the face of John the Evangelist is very similar to that of Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. The Lamentation at least makes an attempt at individualizing the faces of the figures, and there is the illusion of an actual solid body existing underneath the heavy fabrics. The tonal quality to the piece is much greater when compared with The Holy Virgins miniature; there is a wider variety of hues and tints of the colors, and the use of shadow makes the figures more believable. One could wonder if it is because of the use of oils on The Lamentation that gives it its richness, or if Marmion had a greater skill with that medium over tempura on vellum. The backgrounds of both The Lamentation and The Holy Virgins are very similar and are arguably the richest elements of both pieces. The gradation of the sky from darkest to lightest shows a direct observation from the natural world.
Although known in China since the eighth century, wood blocks first made their appearance in Europe in the early fifteenth century and, along with the advent of the printing press and moveable type, helped pave the way for devotional books and images to be printed at a relatively low cost by the sixteenth century. These first wood blocks were simplistic and lacked finer definition of forms. While it may have been more cost effective to purchase a copy of a printed book, many aristocrats and the upper class of Europe still commissioned illuminated manuscripts. Though the time, effort, and large sums of money needed to produce an illuminated manuscript were inconvenient when compared to the new printed manuscripts, the art form itself continued to evolve in complexity and sophistication. Comparing woodblock prints to the illuminations of the later fifteenth/early sixteenth century is much like comparing the earliest Byzantium manuscripts to the works of the master illuminators of the Burgundian courts. In a parchment page depicting Saint Peter from a song book located in Naples from the late thirteenth century, the only illumination on the page was the first capital. Although the large initial P, which illustrates St. Peter’s martyrdom, is dominant on the page due to size and color, the majority of the page is reserved for the Romanesque musical scales. The figures of St. Peter and his executioners are cartoonish in their rendering with no attempt at believable anatomy or facial structure. It is very simplistic when compared with an illuminated manuscript of the sixteenth century. In the Adoration of the Magi, attributed to the Master of James IV of Scotland, text has been completely forsaken for the image. The figures are three-dimensional and modeled realistically, and the background is complex, stretching far off into the distance to a neighboring city. The changes in tone and the variety of colors is quite striking. Every element of the image has been given attention from the strange wood-grained pillars to the towers in the distance to the hay upon which the Virgin Mary sits. The meandering procession of people in the image is to allow a thoughtful meditation by the viewer on the journey of the three Magi to bring their gifts to the Christ child by slowly “exploring” the piece.
As the art form of manuscript illumination grew in complexity, it also continued to branch away from religious texts and into more secular works. René de Anjou, King of Naples and cousin of Philip the Good, was not only a patron of the arts, but an amateur painter himself. He was a poet and author, writing several books on ceremonies, rules of the tournament, and even an allegorical romance about his courtship of Jeanne de Laval, who would later become his wife, called “Conquest qu’un chevalier nomme le Cuer d’amour espris feist d’une dame appelee Doulce Mercy,” or Livre du cueur d’amour espris, which he had turned into an illuminated manuscript. In the story, a knight, accompanied by Desire, tries to win the heart of a lady named Dolce Merci by doing great deeds. The artist who illuminated the manuscript is unknown, but some have suggested that the Master of René de Anjou is perhaps René himself. While no works are specifically known to have been done by René, as an amateur painter, he would have been able to undertake creating an illuminated manuscript. It is possible that the artist is Barthélemy, a painter who had worked under Philip the Good’s patronage and traveled with René to Naples upon Philip’s death. The court records document Barthélemy as being René’s peintre et valet de chambre, a position held by the Limbourg brothers for the Duke de Berry and Jan Van Eyck for Philip the Bold. Barthélemy has several works attributed to him, the most generally accepted as his being the Aix Annunciation. If one were to look at the Aix Annunciation and then the page from Livre du cueur d’amour espris in which the Knight takes the lovesick king’s heart, there are some similarities. The treatment of the drapery on the king’s bed has the same techniques applied to Gabriel’s robes in the Aix Annunciation triptych. However, the knight’s wings are rendered quite differently than Gabriel’s, and the illumination as a whole is softer in appearance and has a greater attention to the shadows and lighting than the triptych. The only surviving illuminated work thought to be by Barthélemy is a Book of Hours done for René along with five miniatures. In a page depicting worshippers at a pagan temple from the text Théséide from the Book of Hours of René de Anjou, one can see a treatment to the fabric and the patterning behind the statuary that is repeated in the carpet and draperies in the illuminations from René’s Livre du cueur d’amour espris, but the treatment of the figures, however, is more sophisticated and the colors more vibrant and rich in the latter, suggesting that perhaps a different hand rendered it, possibly someone who studied under Barthélemy, perhaps even René himself. While it appears unlikely that Barthélemy was responsible for the illuminations of René’s romance, it is more likely that he is the mysterious Master of Shadows who attempted to complete illuminations from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures in the late-fifteenth century. The figures from Théséide and the December page from Très Riches Heures have similar top-heaviness in the men, and all the characters have individualistic features. The rending of the men’s pleated tunics is strikingly similar in both pieces. In other pages from Très Riches Heures, such as September, instead of a home of the Duke de Berry being shown, René’s chateau at Saumar is depicted, a place where René and likely his peintre et valet de chambre spent most of 1460, long after the Limbourg brothers and the Duke de Berry had passed away.
As manuscript illumination began to wane in popularity, Simon Bening emerged as the artist would bridge the dying illumination business into the new arena of miniature portraiture. Bening worked out of a workshop in Ghent, creating an elaborate Book of Hours. On a double-sided leaflet depicting September or October, peasants can be seen ploughing the fields and tending to their animals, a lush and verdant mountainside serving as a background. The figures, even those in the distance, are well-modeled and individualistic. Everything appears to be frozen in mid-motion, and one can understand that Bening had a keen sense of observation from the flicking of the horses’ tails to the change in atmospheric conditions in the furthermost mountains. However, there is no filigreed border filled with foliage or insects or birds; only a simple gold border stands, showcasing the image without distracting the viewer with outside material. Once known as the most famous illuminator of his day, Bening would become equally successful creating miniature portraits, such as his own self portrait from 1558. Bening captures the personality and individualism of himself as he does with his renderings of the peasants in his Book of Hours.
During the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, manuscript illumination flourished in the Burgundian courts. For those that could afford them, manuscripts with illuminations were treasured possessions, each unique to the artist who created the work and customized to the patron who desired it. Yet, even as manuscript illumination reached its golden age in sophistication, it could not compete with the cheaper, easier to produce, and more readily available printed books.
Bibliography
Calkins, Robert G. Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.
De Hamel, Christopher. The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques. London: British Library, 2001.
Hindman, Sandra, et al. Illuminations. The Robert Lehman Collection, vol. 4. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997.
Parshall, Peter, and Rainer Schoch. Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Pognon, Edmond, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Liber, Geneva, 1987.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I posted it 'cause a few people from CDS said they were interested in illumination... and I haven't posted anything of value on my LJ in like forever. One day I'll make an actual "My life..." post.
From:
no subject
also, lauren says you just had a birthday? happy belated, then!!