BY THE MASTER OF THE GENEVA BOCCACCIO
[MASTER OF THE GENEVA BOCCACCIO.]
Miniature cut from a copy of Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale.
[France (Loire Valley, Nantes or Angers), fifteenth century (c. 1460s).]
Miniature on vellum, c. 130 × 100 mm including the gently arched top, the back with part of Book VII in a good bâtarde script; minor surface abrasion and some pigment loss, trimmed to the edges of the gold frame, paper adhered to back where once pasted into an album; in a giltwood frame.
Added to your basket:
Miniature cut from a copy of Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale.
An unusual and iconographically intriguing miniature by one of the greatest painters in the circle of Jean Fouquet, from a deluxe copy of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale almost certainly commissioned by King René of Anjou.
In a room decorated with what appear to be exotic textile hangings, a king with two faces and holding a sceptre oversees a group of richly dressed high priests or bishops, one of whom points dramatically towards a golden column on top of which stands a statue of an armoured man biting a chain which is entwined around him. What exactly is being depicted here? Book VII of the Speculum historiale is largely devoted to the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus, including the birth of Christ, and there are numerous extracts from the writings of Cicero, Virgil, Valerius Maximus, and others. While it is possible that artist intended to evoke, in a generalised way, an atmosphere of ‘pagan’ history and philosophical debate, the curious details of the iconography employed suggest that a specific episode it being alluded to. If so, it is yet to be decoded.
The parent manuscript, now in Lisbon (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal MS. il. 126), lacks its first quire and nine other leaves, of which three are now kept separately with their miniatures excised. Only four miniatures survive in the volume, and at least a dozen more are missing from it, including the present one. The manuscript was studied by Claude Schaefer, who attributed the illumination to the Master of Jouvenel des Ursins, one of the painters of King René of Anjou, to whom more than ten works can be attributed, dating from c. 1460 to c. 1475, and suggested that he could be the artist Coppin Delf, who is documented working for King René.
One of the manuscripts attributed to this master by Schaefer is Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève MS fr. 191. Eberhard König subsequently distinguished at least three artists among those grouped together by Schaefer, and gave the painter responsible for the Lisbon and Geneva manuscripts the name the Master of the Geneva Boccaccio.
Provenance:
1. ?King René of Anjou (1409–1480), Duke of Anjou, King of Naples, Jerusalem, etc. The artist worked mainly for René, and the king’s inventory includes five copies of the text and a Repertorium, whose description in an inventory probably corresponds to the five volumes of the text, plus the Tabula of the text, all illuminated in France but now in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon (MSS il. 125–130), from one of which (MS. il. 126) the present miniature was excised.
2. Peter Birmann (1758–1844), landscape painter and art dealer; pasted to fol. 31 of the album of 475 cuttings and leaves.
3. Sold to Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt (1752–1819), connoisseur and painter, of Basel: sold by his heirs at Sotheby’s, 25 April 1983, lot 129 (six miniatures, the subject of the present miniature described as ‘Probably Cicero disputing over the definition of God’, with a reference to Book VII, chapter 6).
4. Bought by Mark Lansburgh (1925–2013); placed on temporary deposit at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1986 (CMA deposit label on back of frame); one of the six was acquired by the Museum in 1987 (Klein, 2007).
5. Sold, probably in October 1990, to the Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1409.
See Schaefer, ‘Le Maître de Jouvenel des Ursins (Coppin Delf?), illustrateur du “Speculum historiale” de Vincent de Beauvais (Ms. 126 de la Biblioteca Nacional à Lisbonne)’, in Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português, 8 (1974), pp. 81–114, colour plates I–IV, plates 1–41; Bulletin de la Société française de la reproductions de manuscrits a peintures, 14 (1932), plates XIlIb and XIV; König, Französische Buchmalerei um 1450: der Jouvenal-Maler, der Maler des Genfer Boccaccio, und die Anfänge Jean Fouquets (Berlin, 1982), pp. 15, 38, 116, 167, 169, 253; Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520, 1993.
