Trésors enluminés de Normandie: une (re)découverte. Sous la direction de Nicolas Hatot et Marie Jacob.

Abstract

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition that was held in Rouen (December 2016 – March 2017) and is part of a larger long-term project co-ordinated by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art: Corpus des manuscrits enluminés du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance conservés en France. Three earlier catalogues were published in 2013, accompanying regional exhibitions held in Lille, Toulouse, and Angers. As well as covering a new region — Normandy — the special focus of this volume is the history of medievalism. Indeed, Normandy was one of the foremost French regions where medieval art was rediscovered and revalorized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dozens of lesser-known manuscripts (some of these are cuttings, but the majority are full codices) — mainly from museum collections in Caen, Fécamp, Rouen, and other Norman towns — have received careful descriptions by a team of more than thirty scholars. Many of these manuscripts were bequests to these museums by Norman collectors, such as Charles Deshommets de Martainville, Charles Lormier, Alexandre Le Grand, or Édouard Le Corbeiller. The origin of these manuscripts and cuttings (as well as some early illuminated printed books) is, however, multifarious, since they were made in France, Italy, and the Low Countries. There is a special focus on brothers Eugène and Auguste Dutuit who, much to the disappointment of the city of Rouen, bequeathed their collection of twenty thousand artworks to the city of Paris. An essay by José de Los Llanos and Cécile Champs-Vinas traces the history of this collection. The twenty descriptions of manuscripts that belonged to it form a special core in the catalogue, among which are an early fourteenth-century Grand Coutumier de Normandie and a Flemish copy of Jean Wauquelin’s Histoire d’Alexandre commissioned by the Duke of Burgundy in the 1460s. An essay by Nicolas Hatot is dedicated to the French scholar Léopold Delisle; as head of the Bibliothèque nationale from 1874 to 1905, his contribution to the rediscovery of manuscripts was of a different kind: rather than being a collector himself, he acquired numerous important manuscripts for the nation. But the focus on this scholar is also the occasion to draw attention to modern artistic objects inspired by medieval manuscript illumination. Indeed, among the objects described in the catalogue are a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century facsimiles, either handmade or reproduced by means of lithography, and other medievalist derivatives. The overall choice of subjects and objects of this catalogue is rather eclectic, but the result is an interesting volume, on the one hand highlighting relatively unknown manuscripts and their illumination and provenance, and on the other the history of medievalism in Normandy. It is particularly the latter that makes the volume a welcome contribution to this emerging field, which, thus far, has garnered more interest in Anglo-Saxon scholarship than in France. The index of shelfmarks is very useful; an index of (former) owners is unfortunately lacking. The Presses universitaires de Rennes have done a superb job on the design and the finishing of the volume.