Logo DBNL
Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 23 (2016)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 23

(2016)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Saskia van Bergen
Illuminated books of hours and the heritage of L.M.J. Delaissé
The archaeology of the book in recent publications

Researchers dealing with the study of the illuminated manuscript are walking a fine line between two scientific traditions. With one foot they stand firmly in the history of art, with the other in book history. Book illumination and other forms of decoration cannot be separated from the manuscript in which they appear, and questions about style and iconography are as important for research as the text, layout or script.1

In his influential Early Netherlandish painting. Its origins and character from 1953, Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) discussed book illumination from a purely art historical viewpoint.2 His book mainly deals with questions about the style and meaning of works of art, which, in his opinion, could only be answered by studying the works within the time and society in which they were manufactured. Panofsky considered miniature painting as being subordinate to panel painting. The purpose of the first chapter of his book, devoted to book illumination, was mainly to identify the possible sources of inspiration for early fifteenth-century Flemish panel painters. Due to a lack of surviving panel paintings, Panofsky assumed that (almost) none had existed, and that later painters consequently must have looked at the illuminated manuscripts surrounding them.

The main criticism of L.M.J. Delaissé (1914-1972) concerned precisely this art historical focus. Delaissé himself was trained in Romance philology and worked for many years at the manuscripts department of the Royal Library in Brussels, first as a librarian and since 1956 as an (assistant-)curator. His knowledge was largely the result of practical experience, gained during his daily interaction with medieval manuscripts. According to Delaissé, Panofsky considered miniatures too much as autonomous works of art, detached from the context of the manuscript. Delaissé on the other hand promoted an integral approach that he called the ‘archaeology of the book’. This comprised, in his own words ‘observing and analysing all the material data concerning objects of the past and in interpreting them afterwards in order to determine the time and place of their execution’.3

The meaning of the miniatures can thus only be identified when they are analyzed within the context of the entire manuscript, and when all possible relevant data are considered, both material, textual and historical. Delaissé was interested in the whole lifecycle of a manuscript, from the circumstances in which the manuscript was produced, to its distribution and usage.4 He considered the archaeology of the book as something essentially different from codicology. According to him, codicology encompassed the observation and recording of all the physical characteristics of a manuscript, like ruling, pricking and quire structure. Codicological research has a supporting function for the archaeology of the book, which aims to determine the function of the manuscript within society.

Until his death in 1972 Delaissé published many articles and books that emerged from his ideas about the archaeology of the book, including some on the borderline between art- and book history.5 He wrote the catalogue for De gouden eeuw der Vlaamse miniatuur: het mecenaat van Filips de Goede 1445-1475, an exhibition organised in 1959 in Brussels and Amsterdam. In this catalogue he grouped the workshops that were active during the Burgundian period chronologically and geographically, and not, as hitherto had been usual, stylistically around masters.6 His working method can be witnessed at its best in the catalogue he made of the medieval manuscripts in the James A. de Rothschild collection. This catalogue is still recognised as the classic example of how decorated medieval manuscripts should be described scientifically.7

Delaissé also had a special interest in books of hours.8 In 1974 he wrote ‘The importance of books of hours for the history of the medieval book’, an article that is still cited regularly in academic publications.9 Because these prayer books for laymen were produced in such large quantities, especially in the fifteenth century, he considered them a rich source for reconstructing the business of manuscript production in general. Many horae contain miniatures, margin decorations, decorated initials and/or pen work, which allows for examinations from various viewpoints. During the late Middle Ages, books of hours were a popular aid for private devotion, and for this reason they are also

an important source for studying late medieval faith. Because they often contain local elements - such as calendars -, prayer books and books of hours also provide clues for the localisation of larger groups of manuscripts.

This also makes it possible to localise the miniatures in the same manuscripts, and in turn this has led to new information about local and regional styles in illumination. Moreover, Delaissé discovered that books of hours often show characteristics of standard production. Already in 1948 he wrote that there must have been an industry of such horae, operating in the margins of the production reserved for wealthy clients.10

In recent years several articles and books have been published in which the authors explicitly mentioned their debt to Delaissé. In 2013 Sandra Hindman and Jim Marrow published conference proceedings entitled Books of hours reconsidered, for which Hindman wrote the introduction, called ‘Books of hours: state of the research. In memory of L.M.J Delaissé’.11 In 2009 there was a conference entirely devoted to the legacy of Delaissé, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the exhibition De gouden eeuw der Vlaamse miniatuur.



illustratie
Figure 1. S. Hindman, J. Marrow (ed.), Books of hours Reconsidered. Turnhout 2013


The question here is what recent publications on this topic tell us about the direction in which research on illuminated manuscripts, especially prayer books and books of hours is moving. What do they reveal about the relationship between book- and art history, and how relevant is the theory of the archaeology of the book for researchers in the field? And, perhaps more importantly, which issues are being ignored or under-represented?

Books of hours reconsidered?

In Hindmans introduction for Books of hours reconsidered, she explains that the purpose of the volume was to provide a complete overview of the state of research and that therefore the editors invited several extra authors outside the conference to contribute. The book contains 21 essays, which are divided into six themes. Some of these relate to traditional art historical topics such as style, workshop practices, illustration cycles and centres of production. Klara Broekhuijsen for example writes about the decoration program of a group of Dutch books of hours and, similarly, Bronwyn Stocks on variations in the illustration of the hours of the Virgin in Italy. For a long time research on books of hours was focused mainly on Flanders and France, but fortunately in this volume attention is spent on less studied regions such as Italy and Germany as well.12 Delaissé is responsible for the anachronistic statement that books of hours were the ‘bestsellers’ of the Middle Ages, but Jeffrey Hamburger shows that this is certainly not true for all European regions. For example, books of hours never really gained a foothold in Germany, and instead the liber precum was preferred, a manuscript type with a much looser form and which could contain a variety of prayers.13

Unfortunately the volume contains only one essay on the genesis of books of hours. The contribution of Adelaide Bennett, on two psalter-hours from the thirteenth century, emphasises the role of lay devotion in the development of the manuscript type. This is consistent with the traditional view, but according to Hamburger we should instead turn towards the monastic tradition to learn more about the origins of horae. This is a neglected field of research and also this volume lacks contributions on the subject. For Hamburger one of the main reasons for this lack of interest is the fact that the earliest manuscripts were not illustrated or decorated and therefore fall outside the scope of art historians. This is not a criticism directed at Hindman and Marrow as they can only publish topics that are being investigated. It just shows that the art historical tunnel vision unfortunately still exists.

The topic ‘(para-) liturgical use’ is also poorly represented, although to compensate for this the editors offer an extensive and up-to-date bibliography at the end of the volume. Gregory Clark proved earlier that not only the main texts of a book of hours, like

calendars, the hours of the Virgin and the office of the dead, but also variations in additional texts can be useful for localisation. In his contribution he presents how the text of the litany of saints can be used to situate the d'Orge Hours in the east of France, more precisely in the Besançon region. Anne Korteweg carried out a quantitative analysis on 600 Dutch books of hours in the Byvanck database.14 Unlike French and Southern Netherlandish horae, which are mostly in Latin, these were often written in the vernacular. Through this analysis, Korteweg was able to compare the texts of calendars, litanies, hours of the Virgin and office of the dead on the usus of either Utrecht or Windesheim. Her hypothesis is that to create his influential book of hours, Geert Grote translated an existing book of hours for the use of Utrecht, which he transformed with only a few adjustments.

No fewer than five articles deal with the transition between manuscript and print. When in 1986 Hindman described the state of research on illuminated manuscripts, one of her main criticisms was the lack of research on this topic.15 She considered overspecialisation as the main reason for this. For example, research dealing with illustrations in manuscripts (miniatures) and incunabula (woodcuts) tended to be considered as two different and separate research fields that hardly mixed with each other. Fortunately, a lot has changed in recent years. In his essay Todor T. Petev analyses a group of five horae, the woodcuts of which were made at the end of the fifteenth century in Antwerp. Interestingly, specific components of the woodcuts, such as faces, hands and floor patterns were completed and coloured in later manually. For this reason they were often not recognised as prints in the past.

Another topic that is lacking in the volume is the consumption of books of hours and prayer books. This concerns not only questions about how the prayers were read by the first owners, but also their use in later centuries. Fortunately this topic has received attention in several other studies that have been released in recent years. One of them is Virginia Reinburg's book on the social history of late medieval books of hours, published in 2012.16

In French books of hours. Making an archive of prayer, which unfortunately hardly contains illustrations, she analyses all kinds of aspects that have to do with patronage and ownership. For example, she discusses the role of women and children, the use of Latin versus the vernacular, the role of gifts, inheritances, and prayer books and books of hours as ‘diaries’, in which, for example, historical and personal events were recorded and souvenirs were kept. In the second part of her book entitled ‘An ethnography of prayer’ she analyses praying as an activity. Prayers were often accompanied by all sorts of practical information about the way they had to be performed, for example whether

they were supposed to be spoken out loud every morning, or silently recited three times a day. In this section Reinburg discusses different types of prayers, and the functions they fulfilled in the community, whether as petitions for intercession, or the quest for eternal salvation.17 She presents many interesting examples of the use of prayers in the late Middle Ages, but unfortunately there are still many that she did not address. It would have been useful to also include a deeper analysis on one or two prayers, for example to indicate how gender affected prayer, or how the practice of prayer changed with the transformation from handwritten to print culture.



illustratie
Figure 2. V. Reinburg, French books of hours. Making an archive of prayer, c. 1400-1600. Cambridge 2012


The social lives of medieval books

Recently, Kathryn Rudy published a study on a relatively unknown aspect of the late medieval manuscript, termed by her ‘postcards on parchment’.18



illustratie
Figure 3. K.M. Rudy, Postcards on parchment. The social lives of medieval books. Yale 2015


She uses this term to describe images painted on parchment, that were made originally to be used as single leaves, for example as a souvenir or a miniature altarpiece. Out of practical and religious considerations, these images were often kept between the quires of a book of hours or prayer book, and were at some point even bound together with the quires. Most of the more than 300 examples that she has found had been erroneously identified as miniatures. She has found a variety of religious and secular themes, including saints, the arma Christi and the wounds of Christ.

Although we did know such independent images existed, examples can be seen on several fifteenth-century panel paintings, the parchment paintings were not previously described and analysed as a separate category. In his Early Netherlandish Painting Panofsky already concluded that, considering the imagery and mise-en-page, the opening in the Très Belles Heures du Duc de Berry showing Jean de Berry being presented to the Virgin had to be made for another, somewhat larger manuscript, or, as he noted, could have been an independent devotional diptych as well.19 Rudy believes that Panofsky should have treated such parchment paintings in a separate section, in between the introduction on book illumination and the rest of the book, but at that time he knew too few examples to describe them separately. In her study Rudy discusses various aspects of the parchment paintings, such as how to recognise them, what functions they fulfilled, and

also how cataloguers should describe medieval manuscripts to make them easier to find. Parchment paintings could be produced by professional illuminators, but many of them were the modest products of home industry. Indeed herein lies the value of Rudy's book; both groups are described as one category, without making an aesthetic judgment about them.20 This fits in with the spirit of Delaissé who explicitly spoke out against an aristocratic-based approach of illumination, in which only the highlights are deemed worthy of study.



illustratie
Figure 4. C. Hourihane (ed.), Manuscripta Illuminata. Approaches to understanding medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Princeton (ny) 2014


In her study Vision, devotion, and self-representation in late medieval art from 2014, Alexa Sands analyses the themes patronage and consumption from the perspective of the owner portrait.21 Late medieval prayer books and books of hours often contain portraits of patrons kneeling before Mary or a patron saint, sometimes even depicted with a prayer book in their hand. These are self-referential images; when using the manuscript and looking at the miniature, the patron is actually looking at a picture of him- or herself.

Unfortunately Sands does not appear to be very interested in codicology and book research, since she consistently analyses the miniatures completely independent of the manuscripts (and the texts).22 This is regrettable, because the relationship between text and image is essential to recover the meaning of the portraits. The user of the manuscript could only achieve the desired spiritual experience by looking at the image of him-/herself while reading the prayers. It would have been helpful when she had included appendices with the accompanying texts. Moreover, her scope is narrowly focused on the clients who ordered the manuscripts. Only in her conclusion Sand examines the subsequent owners of the manuscripts and the ways they could have interpreted and adjusted the images. What if a manuscript was ordered by a woman, but later came into the hands of a man? Did they then add additional owner portraits? Or adapt the Latin prayers? And what if the next owner was a member of another family? Were the coats of arms then changed or deleted? All these questions remain unanswered. Fortunately, Anne Rudloff Stanton addresses several of these aspects thoroughly in her article ‘Design, devotion, and durability in Gothic prayer books’ that she wrote for Manuscripta Illuminata published in 2014.23

Rudloff Stanton analyses the several ways in which English thirteenth-century prayer books were adjusted over a longer period by subsequent owners. The book is the result of a conference organised on the occasion of the publication of the catalogue Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Princeton University Library.24 The purpose of the volume was to place the collection of the library within a wider context. As a result there are contributions concerning all types of medieval manuscripts, produced from the early to the late Middle Ages, with a focus on art-historical aspects. Reinburg wrote a contribution here as well, mainly summarizing her earlier book, supplemented by some examples from the Princeton collections. Especially interesting is the contribution of Stella Panayatova on the Rohan masters, a group of illuminators named after the miniatures in a book of hours now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.25 Together with the article that Eberhard König wrote on the same illuminators in Books of hours reconsidered, the two authors offer an informative insight into developments in the field of style research and connoisseurship.

New perspectives for style research

In recent decades, style research and distinguishing hands within a workshop received less attention from art historians dealing with illumination, in favour of book historical themes like the use of models, decorative programs and workshop practices. Partly

due to the fact that mainly qualitative arguments were used, the value of this research method has been increasingly challenged. The stylistically finest works were attributed to the master himself and the works that were based on the same sources, but in the eyes of connoisseurs showed less quality, to assistants or followers. Indeed, the assumption has been that a really great master would only create and never copy himself.26 But this ignores the possibility that differences in quality could also be caused by other factors, such as budget, or the time constraints under which a workshop had to work.

In the last few years, style research seems to have come back in the spotlight. The aforementioned essays of Panayatova and König are examples of this, along with Miranda Bloem's 2015 PhD dissertation on the masters of Zweder van Culemborg.27

Whereas König chooses to represent the traditional vision, Bloem and Panayatova show a contemporary approach to connoisseurship, in which the influence of Delaissé is still visible. According to König everything revolves around the person of the connoisseur: ‘Ultimately, however, it is the practiced eye that decides whether we may distinguish several hands or preserve the integrity of an artist's oeuvre’ (p. 342). In his view, a true connoisseur will immediately see whether a work of art really is the creation of the master to which it is attributed and it is his job to convince others of his judgement.

Stella Panayatova also uses stylistic analysis, but combines it with both codicological and technical research28 to reconstruct the production of the so-called Hours of Isabella Stuart.29 She includes infrared technology (to reveal underdrawings) and pigment analysis, but also looks at the use of models and the division of labour within a codicological unit, quire or double leaf. Her conclusion is that the entire manuscript must be the product of careful planning, with no signs of haste, errors or compromises. Traditionally, the miniatures were attributed to two different workshops, both belonging stylistically to the Rohan group: the Rohan master himself and the Giac master. Panayatova distinguishes a third hand that she (like König) calls the Madonna master. According to her it was not the Rohan master himself, but the (at least to us) lesser-known Giac master who must have been the coordinator of the production. Nonetheless all three masters worked in close proximity on the same quires and even on the same miniatures. She describes the collaboration as an ‘organic feel of collaboration, reciprocal exchange and artistic growth’ (p. 36).



illustratie
Figure 5. M. Bloem, De Meesters van Zweder van Culemborg. De werkplaatspraktijken van een groep Noord-Nederlandse verluchters, ca. 1415-1440. PhD-thesis Universiteit van Amsterdam 2015


Miranda Bloem holds a similar view on the division of labour and cooperation between illuminators. She studied the group of illuminators known as the masters of Zweder van Culemborg, the leading illuminators in Utrecht between circa 1415 and 1440. Their name is derived from a missal that they illuminated for the bishop-elect of Utrecht Zweder van Culemborg.30 Thirty-five manuscripts and fragments are attributed to the masters, of which about half are books of hours and prayer books. A large number were made as commissions, although the identity of the patron is not always known. This oeuvre is not the work of a single workshop, but was produced by multiple artists working in closely related styles.

Bloem writes extensive and very enjoyable descriptions of the illuminations, making her conclusions easy to follow. She combines her analysis with research on the use of models by the different illuminators, looking to see how any divisions in the group can be determined by working methods. In her introduction she refers explicitly to the archaeology of the book as one of her main methods of research. She combines codicological analysis with meticulous stylistic research, not only of the miniatures, but also of the secondary decorations (i.e. painted margins and penwork). Originally she planned to make also technical research a key component of her thesis, but (for budgetary reasons?) this could not be completed as hoped. As a result, a number of questions

remained unanswered. The Missal of Eberhard von Greiffenklau for example contains an image of a patron dressed in green garments that have become transparent over the course of time.31 This has revealed that another set of clothes was painted underneath. This could mean that a later owner had this miniature adapted to fit contemporary fashion. Technical research, for example on the pigments, could help to find out whether further changes have been made to the miniature, revealing not only more information about the status of the owner and /or patron of the manuscript, but also of the illuminators involved (p. 273).

Bloem shows that within the group of the Zweder masters, an ad hoc organisation of production took place, similar to the Rohan masters. Illuminators worked in varying combinations with each other, and for each manuscript they divided the work differently. In her analysis of the Egmont breviary she makes clear that the masters of Zweder van Culemborg provided the illuminations together with the masters of Otto van Moerdrecht, but both ateliers worked completely independently from each other.32 Nowadays the Zweder masters are considered stylistically the best illuminators of the two groups, but apparently they were responsible for a smaller share of production. At the same time they tended to make the most prominent miniatures and they also must have been the workshop coordinating the decoration of the manuscript.

Conclusion

The weakness of stylistic analyses is that, for an outsider without access to the original material, they are impossible to check. This makes the authority of the connoisseur essential in the assessment of his conclusions. This does not change with the use of technical or codicological research, but what some of the recent studies do show is that the results obtained on the basis of the three methods are complementary to each other. And that to me is exactly what constitutes the archaeology of the book. Only by combining all the data obtained it's possible to get an accurate view of the conditions under which an illuminated manuscript was produced. In this process stylistic analysis is not an aim but a means. Unfortunately, there have not been many technical investigations on manuscripts yet. This type of research takes a lot of time and money and requires in situ analysis of manuscripts that are often spread over several continents.

A second still relatively unexplored area is quantitative research. Looking at the publications of the last few years, not much work has been done on horae in this respect. Apart from the articles of Korteweg and Clark no data-analysis has been done, and researchers do not have access to published data of their colleagues through an online service. This is the more regrettable because books of hours are very well suited for this type of research, for example to mine saints names in calendars, the division of texts

within codicological units, or comparisons of illustration cycles from different regions. An exception is the work of Erik Drigsdahl on texts in books of hours, although after his death in 2015 the popular website he had maintained for many years went suddenly offline, showing the vulnerability of private initiatives.33

Indeed, much of the data that could provide this type of research is already available in other private databases, but these are either not publicly accessible, or the infrastructure is outdated making them of limited use. Why, for example, is it still impossible to get the Byvanck database online and link the content with data from the Bibliotheca Neerlandica Manuscripta, or with datasets collected by researchers like Drigsdahl? To achieve this, scientists will have to join forces and must be willing to look beyond the borders of their own individual research. The history of the handwritten book, whether illuminated or not, book of hours or any other type, can ultimately only be written through cooperation and collaboration. Delaissé's theory of the archaeology of the book has helped, and will also help in the future, to offer glimpses of the society in which these books were produced.


Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs