The Northern Renaissance in miniature

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2004 by Donald Bruce

ILLUMINATING the Renaissance: the Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting at the Royal Academy is at the same time less sparkling and more memorable than Gothic: Art for England, 1400-1547, the recent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. From the moment one passed the dramatically presented entrance to Gothic, one's emotions were heightened: it is the purpose of drama to promote spurious emotion. One was overwhelmed by the coup de theatre of the four sixteenth-century heraldic beasts from Cumbria, stupendous and spot-lit: the genuflecting griffin, the ram leaping to uphold its banner, the majestic salmon and the crown-collared bull licking its lips with its gilded tongue. The alternation of dimness and light and the son et lumiere temporarily beguiled one into supposing that something meaningful was taking place, although what was on display was often trivial (old ecclesiastical vestments and Dick Whittington's spoons) or crassly arranged. Two of the supreme treasures of late medieval illumination (the Duke of Bedford's Salisbury Breviary and the Bedford Psalter and Book of Hours) were stacked, open among other prayer-books in a barely visible pile. They should have been lent to the Royal Academy, which likes to make exhibits discernible. The Victoria and Albert Museum is a confused institution. Originally, as a collection of ornamental art, it was a repository for objects from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Since then, less by intent than by haphazard accretion, it has absorbed Renaissance sculptures and artefacts, Raphael cartoons, musical instruments, portrait miniatures, Punjabi pictures, posters, fashion-plates and much more. It remains a museum rather than an art gallery: a museum largely of design and applied art. Gothic was a well staged show, whilst Illuminating the Renaissance is a revelation.

The illuminators of fifteenth-century manuscript books are generally shuffled off by art historians into corners, niches and footnotes. One wanders in search of names mostly as forgotten as those of the masons of Winchester and Ely. It is a pity one cannot rescue them from their anonymity, these Masters of this and that, and those known only by librarians' shelf-marks. Our ignorance imposes code-numbers, and there is little allurement in news about Fitzwill. Ms. 257a, as distinct from Simon Bening's Presentation in the Temple.

Identification is further confused by the collaboration of several artists on one manuscript, such as The Hours of Mary of Burgundy, and the number of their assistants contributing individual components, such as borders and initials. Their intricate work sometimes spanned decades. The Duke of Bedford's Salisbury Breviary (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) took thirty-six years and was still left unfinished. It was, after all, the age of Le Roman de la Rose (which occupied two successive poets for a total of forty years) and the cathedral-builders.

Often an illumination is equal to a panel painting of the time. Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus and Gerard David were accomplished in both forms. Although the pigments were the same, ranging from costly exotic ultramarine to local vegetable dyes such as madder and indigo, a radical change of technique was needed when they were mixed with egg-white or plant-gum rather than oil. The presence of a text further enforced versatility. The Baptism of Christ was one of three miniatures which van Eyck contributed to a missal for John, Count of Holland, in c. 1443. (As if to illustrate the complications of the study of manuscript books, part of the missal was bound into a Book of Hours for the bibliophile duc de Berry that later became known as the Milan-Turin Book of Hours. Two other Books of Hours remained in the Duke's collection, the more famous of which was Les Tre's Riches Heures now in Chantilly.)

The arrangement of van Eyck's miniature ingeniously coheres with the text. Above the prayer for the Feast of St John the Baptist is painted the birth of St John in a bed hung with scarlet velvet in an opulent Flemish interior. The crafty perspective leads to a glazed passage where Zacharias, his father, records St John's name in a notebook. In the foreground a cat and a dog, munching their food, point their noses to the text. God, enthroned in the capital letter of the text, dispatches the Holy Ghost across the middle section of the text towards John's baptism of his cousin Jesus in the bas de page, or lower picture. There van Eyck replaced the River Jordan with the castle-terraced Rhine (Museo Civico, Turin). In an anonymous and even more enterprising illustration of hawking, part of a treatise on Sin from Genoa, birds fly not only around but also through the words of the text (British Library, London).

A centrepiece at the entrance to Illuminating the Renaissance, grandly attributed to Rogier van der Weyden, is the frontispiece to Jean Wauquelin's rendering of The Chronicles of Hainaut (1448). Wauquelin slanted his version of the original Latin to please Duke Philip of Burgundy by justifying his seizure of the southern Flemish earldom of Hainaut from his cousin Jaqueline in 1443. Wauquelin probably presented his work to Philip, flatteringly called 'the Good' in the winter of 1448, since it was not listed among Philip's books until 1449. That it is winter is evident from the frontispiece. Philip has looped a hooded hat round his withered long face. The formidable Chancellor Rolin, who converses eye-to-eye with Our Lady in van Eyck's portrait, has tucked his hands into his fur-lined sleeves.