DECEMBER 2011
248 pages, hardback, 255 x 255, 120 colour illustrations
PRICE: £50.00
ISBN: 978 1 903470 95 4
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In the 1470s, one of the most innovative artists working in Bruges illuminated a Book of Hours for Jean Carpentin, lord of Gravile and prominent citizen of Normandy. Known as the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book after one of his other masterpieces, this artist and members of his workshop enriched the pages of Carpentin’s manuscript with miniatures, historiated initials and boldly coloured borders in which human figures, monsters and monkeys are framed by twisting branches of acanthus. The manuscript’s rich programme of illumination includes 22 full-page miniatures, 42 historiated initials, and 64 borders incorporating biblical and apocryphal subjects as well as the Master’s characteristically stocky peasants engaged in quotidian (and sometimes profane) activities.
The figures that populate the Master’s borders are busy with activities that relate to the adjacent miniatures. Many of the borders contain a sensitive development of the miniature’s themes. In the borders adjacent to the miniature of Pilate washing his hands, Pilate’s wife is tempted by the devil and a carpenter begins to fashion the cross; opposite, Christ is tormented as he carries the cross, and in the margin Judas repents, commits suicide, and is tormented by a simian winged devil. On other pages, the Master’s stocky peasants carry wood, fight monsters and play games seemingly oblivious to the dramatic narratives unfolding nearby.
Until the late 1990s the Carpentin Hours was virtually unknown to scholarship. The present study is the first detailed assessment of this important manuscript, which is a magnificent demonstration of the Dresden Master’s wit, invention and technical virtuosity.
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This is the catalogue to an outstanding collection of Medieval art from a private collection. Ranging from paintings and sculpture to stained glass, manuscripts and caskets, many of the objects presented here are of absolute rarity, some are previously unpublished and - until recently - unknown. More
"This sumptuously illustrated book, which accompanied the exhibition at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges in 2007–8, is an important new study of the late-fourteenth-century Valenciennes-born sculptor André Beauneveu whose surviving works deserve to be more widely known." (Church Monuments journal) The full scope of his talent was exploited by the celebrated royal patron Jean de Berry, for whom he produced manuscript illuminations, made designs for stained glass and oversaw the construction of his château at Mehun-sur-Yevre. However, it is primarily his very great skill in the handling of stone which gives Beauneveu such particular significance in the history of late medieval art. More
Medieval art has been collected for at least 200 years, yet there is a perception that if it is not locked away in a monastery it has found its home in a museum long ago. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the richness and variety of what still lies unclaimed by history that makes this material so interesting. More
In the middle of the fourteenth century, Europe was devastated by an appalling epidemic which killed a third of its population. Accused of having spread the disease, Jewish communities faced terrible persecutions, which often led them to bury their most valuable goods. Two of these hoards, discovered at Colmar in 1863 and at Erfurt in 1998, are discussed and illustrated in this splendid catalogue, published to accompany an exhibition at the Wallace Collection London. More