Medieval illuminators and their methods of work (review)

Reviews Alexander, Jonathan J. G., Medieval illuminators and their methods of work, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. vui, 214; 218 monochrome illustrations, 29 colour plates; R.R.P. US$50.00. Professor Alexander's book joins the ever-growing number of surveys and reviews of medieval western manuscript illumination; for example, Pacht (1984) and D e Hamel (1986). This work develops and expands his discourses delivered at Oxford in 1983 as the James P. R. Lyell Lectures in Bibliography. His contribution is notable for its readable series of presentations, free in the main from post hoc comparative material and trendy jargon. After chapters on available source material, technical aspects of illumination, and programmes of illustration, he concentrates on western European workshops from the early Christian era to the late fifteenth century, intentionally eschewing the periphery of the Continent and the vast cultural legacy of the Byzantine Emphe. However, one may be excused for querying his preference for a 'diachronic'ratherthan a 'synchronic' approach to the discipline of manuscript studies (p. 2). Furthermore, the unusually full and helpful bibliography would have been enhanced by areferencetothe late Charles Storting's sumptuous two-volume survey La peinture midiivale a Paris 1300-1500 (1987 and 1990). Alexander performs a good service by exposing an often unintended result in the area of pictorial attributions. There is no doubt that art historians have experienced, and continue to experience, great difficulty in identifying this Master or that Master. One is tempted to cloak indecision by inventing circles of acolytes. The Boucicaut Master's rayonnement, in the eyes of Millard Meiss, grew to, literally, a band of followers of followers (p. 129). Alexander believes that there should be a terminus point for the influence of an atelier. He observes (p. 52) ' . . . how very important tradition was in the art of the Middle Ages, and how difficult a matter it could be to alter an accepted image or to apply illustration to a text which had not before received it'. But, how is the reader to reconcile this with other claims that artists 'decided on the nature of new images' or 'modified then models' (pp. 143, 144, 149)? 134 Reviews Chapter six contains an insight into toe sometimes vexing subject of pattern books. They were the 'tools of trade' which were guarded jealously by peintres or then workshops, and which carried acceptable imagery for the purpose of reproduction in manuscripts, or on panels. There exists in the study of art history an inherent danger in claiming that a representation similar to another was derived from a perceived original. However, Alexander's emphatic claim (pp. 122-3) that a manuscript portrayal of the Black Prince was copied from a now-destroyed wall painting in St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster, is, when the two plates offered by Alexander for comparative purposes are closely examined, not convincing. The placement offigure207 sits precariously, as it lacks visual comparative material. In a chapter about fourteenth- andfifteenth-centurymanuscript illumination we are given an example of a sixteenth-century initial (figure 214) for comparative purposes, which serves little function. The reader will be disadvantaged by not knowing the proportions of manuscript illuminations, whether they are details of larger formats, and, of particular interest, the size relationship to comparable material. Alexander cites D e M61y in his discussion on Lyon, Bibl. de la Ville, M S . 517 (p. 163, n. 6) concerning Benigne Guyot, but is unaware of this reviewer's extensive comments based on a personal inspection of the codex and published in the Brussels Horloge de Sapience (1990), pp. 24-25, a volume he cites passim. When are art historians going to catch up with historians of French literature? Alexander also still employs 'de Deguileville', as did Camille for his Ph. D. at Cambridge in 1985; although, Edmond Faral, in a monograph for vol. xxxix (1952) of the Histoire littiraire de la France sanctioned 'deDigullevUle'. Some fractured English can be observed here and there: 'Another example is a figure swinging an implement or weapon, and turning in profile in the opposite direction' (p. 87), or 'Cuthbert playing as a boy rebuked by an Angel' (fig. 137), or 'Cuthbert...