Flemish Manuscript Painting in Context: Recent Research (review)

The essays in this handsome volume were selected and reconfigured from the symposium papers presented at the Los Angeles and London venues of the landmark exhibition of Flemish manuscripts, Illuminating the Renaissance. Some were reworked from the concluding remarks (James Marrow's and Jonathan Alexander's) and one from a series of public lectures at the Getty (Margaret Scott's); Richard Gay has added to the biographies of scribes begun in the catalogue. While the scholarly approaches in this collection range from broadly contextual to hypnotically microscopic, they all serve to clarify our understanding of the manuscripts and of the personalities who created and owned them.

The essays are grouped into four sections. The first, "Illuminated Manuscripts in the Burgundian Court," begins with Lorne Campbell's discovery of the identity of a book's owners hidden in an acrostic, their heraldry and family histories here fleshed out with documents. Catherine Reynolds considers the courtly fashion for undecorated borders in terms both of the dynamics of one-upmanship and the aesthetics of panel painting. Chrystèle Blondeau discusses the enthusiasm of the Burgundian court for Alexander the Great, a hero so admired for his Eastern conquests that he was given monotheistic impulses. Margaret Scott's essay considers the depiction of dress in manuscripts made for Charles the Bold alongside his wardrobe accounts, suggesting that the drap d'or frisé he wore (an elaborately tufted cloth of gold) was not meaningless ostentation but would have been recognized as a sartorial claim to the rank of king.

The second section, "Techniques, Media, and the Organization of Production," is the longest and perhaps most intriguing for its concentration on the nuts and bolts of the illuminator's career. Nancy Turner's examination of the painting techniques of five illuminators over the course of a century focuses (literally, and at high magnification) not on the analysis of pigments but on the tiny strokes, scumbling, and washes of color, the varying coarseness of ground pigment, and the ingenious depiction of so elusive a subject as spittle, that made the work of Flemish miniaturists so sought after. Lieve Watteeuw's essay emphasizes the daunting technical expertise required to keep the paint on the vellum, but also reveals through payment records how much time craftsmen spent in repairing, regilding, and touching up the work of their fellows. Lorne Campbell's essay shifts deftly from a consideration of archival evidence to discussion of style to microphotographs, to argue that the mind and hand behind the iconic frontispiece to the Chroniques de Hainaut was Rogier van der Weyden's. Stephanie Buck carefully untangles the close relationship between drawing and illuminated manuscripts (already linked by common support, working tools, and scale) but reminds us that the distinction may ultimately be artificial. Jan Van der Stock's essay challenges the notion that art historians can ever hope to identify individual hands, and argues that the flexible regrouping, mobility, and subcontracting that characterized the business of late Flemish illumination flourished within the guild framework.

Section 3, "Individual Illuminators," gives the most attention to matters of connoisseurship. Gregory T. Clark introduces a fascinating manuscript in the Gulbenkian, featuring its owner at prayer in a series of seven varied portraits in the manner of the lady in the Vienna Hours of Mary of Burgundy, and proposes an identity for the Master of Fitzwilliam 268. Dominique Vanwijnsberghe traces compositions used by a second-tier illuminator under the sway of a first-tier style, whose movements and political sympathies also suggest a name for the Master of Edward IV. Elizabeth Morrison delves into the obscure iconographic choices of the master responsible for the David scenes in the Grimani Breviary, suggesting that the tituli he supplied indicate even contemporaries found them puzzling.

The concluding remarks offered at the end of the symposia went beyond the traditional summing up of the issues raised by the works shown, to...