Picturing Kingship: History and Painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (review)

The St. Louis Psalter, now MS lat. 10525 in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, is one of the most famous of all gothic illuminated manuscripts and is certainly one of the works that has assured thirteenth-century Paris its reputation as the major center of book illumination of the period. The psalter was intended for a male reader, but it has a sister manuscript intended for a female—the so-called Isabella Psalter in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Both books are the subject of a substantial literature, but the latest study by the late Harvey Stahl (d. 2002) is much the most comprehensive, handsome, and thoroughgoing; it was brought to completion by Melissa Moss. Central to the manuscript's importance is its association with King Louis IX of France (1226–70, canonized 1297). The link to Louis is recognized as being "circumstantial" but beyond reasonable doubt; a flyleaf has a fifteenth-century inscription stating, "Cest psaultier fu Saint Loys, "by which time the book was manifestly a relic. According to Stahl, the manuscript was made after 1258 but before 1270, and although nothing can be said about Louis's agency in planning its contents, the presumption of this, as of earlier studies by W. C. Jordan and others, is that the psalter is, in effect, a model of thinking that might have been characteristic of the Capetians in other ways. Here Stahl's study ties in with other investigations of the art of Paris of the period including Daniel Weiss's crusade-focused study of the Sainte-Chapelle, also commissioned by Louis.

Stahl's intervention is, first, a methodical account of the book's archaeology and artistic context, accompanied by a complete set of images of the Old Testament miniatures that preface its psalter. It will be difficult to surpass this study at the technical level, although some things are underplayed, such as the importance of the c. 1200 psalter of English manufacture now in Leiden, which contains an inscription stating that Louis was taught to read from it: It too has prefatory Bible pictures. Still, the book's physical makeup, its Parisian artistic character, its debt to art beyond the gothic world (Byzantium especially), its position in the distinguished history of Romanesque and gothic psalters with Bible prefatory pictures, and the "program" of selection underlying its narratives are all as full as could reasonably be hoped for—so full indeed that the sheer quantity of descriptive material and scholarly digression occasionally distract from the main lines of argument. A larger book about Parisian art more generally is implicit in much that is said here.

Stahl was, by training, a follower of Kurt Weitzmann, interested in tracing the filiation of narrative illustrations in a form of pictorial philology. This interest continues in the present study, but it is greatly extended and troubled by the issue of context. It is one thing to consider the history of Bible pictures as pictures working within certain wide traditions; another to see them, as here, as indicative of narrower circumstances, including—since the study of the psalter by Jordan—the belief that books with Bible pictures in them were overtly or covertly working according to political presuppositions about kingship or the crusades. What kind of thought is evident in such planning, and is it really contextual or topical? The Bible as a source of universal history and ethical doctrine was coming back into fashion in the writings of influential French mendicants just at the time that the psalter was being executed, and although the work of Genet on political tracts of the period is noted (Genet points out that it was the Capetian court that gave birth to the true Miroir au Prince), Stahl might have said less about specific topical concerns and more about the role of the Bible in the formation of political thinking in general. He ends, cautiously...