Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (review)

Reviews 203 which could be leveUed at many worthy festschrifts. Provision of an index is essential, given the considerable amount of comment and literary information (coutumes, characters, genres, topoi, rhetorical flowers, allegorical themes, etc.) amassed between these covers. K. V. Sinclair Department of Modern Languages James Cook University Camille, Michael, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Rennet, Illuminator, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. 296; 145 b / w illustrations, 45 colour plates; R.R.P. US$40.00. Each chapter of The Master of Death commences with a particular story devised by the author, Michael Camtile, wherein it quickly becomes apparent that the line between fact and fiction has been blurred. Camtile states (p. 3): 'What is most important about that person w h o forms the subject of this book is the fact that he is not important—at least in the terms of the History of Art.' (A non-art historian but a recognised authority on manuscripts, Francois Avrti of the BibUotheque Nationale in Paris, regards the artist's work as 'monotonous'.) Camille continues: my goal is not to 'discover' a long-forgotten genius in the line of anonymous medieval masters, but rather to imagine the working world of an ordinary artisan making run-of-the-mill products in the proto-industry of the fourteenth-century Parisian book trade, (p. 4) The clue to what Camille's book is about rests in the verb 'imagine'; much of his writing has little to do with art history but is a personal discourse flying on the coat-tails of questionable twentieth-century 'authorities' from alienfields,such as Dilthey, Foucault and Derrida. For example, w e read (p. 7): 'Rather than attempt to conjure up Huizinga's "spirit of the age", today "it is necessary to team spirits", 204 Reviews to use Derrida's phrase, to c o m m u n e with more particular phantoms of our political and social memory.' W e are led to believe that a certain Pierre Remiet has been definitively identified as antiluminatorof Parisian manuscripts in the latter part of the fourteenth and possibly into the early fifteenth century. Patrick de Winter identified the hand as 'Perrin Remy' (p. 258). Camille has decided to call him Pierre Remiet (p. 33). But in truth, the person to w h o m Camille attributes the pictures under discussion is still merely an unsubstantiated name on which he has hung his narrative. Camtile mentions (p. 13) that in a manuscript of Guillaume de 'Deguilevtile's' [sic] three Pelerinages (Paris, B.N., M S . fr 823, fol. 18 verso) there is a blank in the vellum, near which is recorded a note—'Remiet ne faites rien cy car je y feray unefigurequi y doit estre' ('Remiet, make nothing here because I wiU make a figure which should be there.'). The note is considered to be by 'the scribe and libraire Oudin de Cavarnay'. Merely because the Paris property taxes of 1428 listed 'a Pierre Remyet as having a "maison" on the rue de la Parcheminerie' (p. 27), can this be a justification for claiming this m a n to be the 'Remiet' of the note, considered by Camtile to have been born c. 1348 (p. 31)? By all means postulate, as Camille does, 'who is Remiet', but the unsubstantiated assertion does rather stretch one's credulity. Throughout his book, Camille conveys an impression that Remiet was personally involved in his work, as though the artist was taking decisions on what to put in the vellum pages he was illuminating and adding his o w n touches. For instance; 'Painted towards the end of his o w n life, Remiet made his Saviour into just another pilgrim to the shrine of St James at Compostella' (p. 246). There is nothing particularly personalised about this imagery, since it is hardly unusual to see Christ depicted as a pilgrim in the text Pelerinage de Jesus-Christ. Such representation was commonplace. Are w e really to beUeve that an 'unimportant' simple artisan of the fourteenth century personalises himself here, as Camille suggests? Camille sometimes errs also in his iconographical interpretations. H e argues, for...