THE BATTLE OF IBERA AT WHICH THE ROMANS DEFEATED HASDRUBAL: a miniature from Jean Miélot’s (d. 1472) translation of Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola (d. 1388), Romuléon, in French, illuminated manuscript on vellum[Eastern France (Langres), 15th century (c. 1480–85)]
a cutting, c.130 × 100 mm, trimmed to the edge of the miniature, the reverse with 21 lines of text in a rounded bâtard script, describing Postumus’s death, and how the Boii returned the spoils, including a paragraph beginning ‘Les Boyens emporterent ses despouilles et son chief a leur temple …’, the miniature depicting Posthumus, on horseback, being struck in his shoulder with a lance held by the foremost of a group of knights in armour, two holding standards with the black imperial two-headed eagle on a gold background, with broken weapons and wounded men in the foreground, a river flowing through the landscape in the background, a small area at the top of the miniature reserved for the rubric ‘Le xme. chap(itr)e’; a few areas of minor pigment loss, mainly at the extreme edges, otherwise in fine condition; framed.
PROVENANCERENÉ II (1451–1508), DUKE OF LORRAINE: the volume from which this cutting derives was demonstrably copied from Charles the Bold’s copy, illuminated by Loyset Liédet and dated 1464 by its scribe David Aubert (now Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS. Med. pal. 156), which was certainly owned by Renés son Anthony, Duke of Lorrraine, in 1510, just after René’s death; it must therefore surely have been part of the booty, the Burgunderbeute, captured by René in his series of victories in battle over Charles the Bold, culminating in the latter’s defeat and death at Nancy in 1477 (McKendrick, 2012). At least two other miniatures were cut out and acquired by 1847 by the Musée Cluny, Paris (Cl. 886; Du Sommerard, 1847), and all the others were cut out by 1884, when the parent volume was given to the municipal library at Niort (where it was formerly MS 25; it is now Mediathèque, Rés. G2F), by a local judge, Edmond-Emmanuel Arnauldet (1827–1899).F. Doerling, Hamburg (said to have been acquired from Hartung & Karl, Munich); sold at Christie’s, 21 June 1989, lot 7 (col. ill.); bought by Tulkens.Sold in our rooms, 8 December 2015, lot 33 (col. ill.); bought by:The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1431.
TEXT AND ILLUMINATIONThere are two translations of Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola’s Romuléon into French; one of which was begun by Jean Miélot at the request of Philip the Good in 1460 and finished two or three years later. Only six complete manuscripts are known to exist, all made in the southern Netherlands, plus a seventh, made in France, now in Niort, from which the present cutting comes. The text has never been printed. All the Netherlandish copies, three of them written by the scribe David Aubert were apparently made for patrons in the Burgundian court. It has been shown that the French one was copied in Lorraine for René, Duke of Lorraine, from a copy he had captured in battle from Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Fourteen cuttings from the same manuscript were sold at Christie’s in 1989 (the present one being one of only two reproduced in colour), and in 1993 Nicole Reynaud attributed them to an artist working in Langres for clients in Lorraine and Champagne, c. 1480–85 (Avril & Reynaud, 1993). A few years later, François Avril recognised six more miniatures at the Museum of Enamels at Limoges (Baujard, 1997), and he has continued to expand the corpus since then, most recently with a list of additional manuscripts and an analysis of the style of the artist, whom he named the Romuléon Master (Avril, 2020). Among the manuscripts now attributed to the artist are: New York, Morgan Library, MS M.26; Karlsruhe, Badisches Landsbibliothek, MS Karlsruhe 3118; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28805; Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi C IV 115; and London, British Library, Add. MS 15702. From the evidence provided by such manuscripts, Avril concludes that the artist trained in Paris in the 1470s, where he must have studied the work of the Master of Jacques de Besançon, but he was also familiar with the work of Jean Fouquet’s followers at Tours, and in the 1480s he worked in the East France, perhaps at Langres or Lorraine.
‘The Niort volume was once a magnificently illustrated manuscript, which may have contained as many as 75 miniatures. … Had it survived intact, this volume would have stood comparison with the grandest copies of secular texts that were illustrated in Western Europe during the last quarter of the fifteenth century’ (McKendrick, 2012, p. 73).
The present miniature was identified in 1989 as The Death of Postumus at the Hands of the Boii, and has been used since 2015 to illustrate the Wikipedia page ‘Lucius Postumius Albinus (consul 234 BC)’. The text on the reverse is from Book 5, chapter 9, and the miniature includes the rubric for chapter 10: it must therefore instead depict the battle of Ibera in 215 BC, at which the Romans under the Scipios defeated Hasdrubal and his army and thereby prevented them joining Hannibal in Italy. It comes from fol. 57 of the parent manuscript.
We are grateful to Scot McKendrick, who is currently preparing a study of this group of miniatures, for providing the correct identification of the scene.
REFERENCESE. Du Sommerard, Musée des Thermes et de l’Hôtel de Cluny: Catalogue et description des objets d’art de l’antiquité, du moyen-âge et de la renaissance, exposés au Musée (Paris, 1847), nos. 794, 804.
F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris, 1993), p. 376.
S. McKendrick, ‘The Romuléon and the Manuscripts of Edward IV’, England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, (Stamford, 1994), pp. 149–69.
S. McKendrick, ‘Charles the Bold and the Romuléon: Reception, Loss and Influence’, in Kunst und Kulturtransfer zur Zeit Karls des Kühnen, ed. by N. Gramaccini and M.C. Schurr (Bern, 2012), pp. 59–84.
F. Avril, in European Illuminated Manuscripts in the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection, ed. by J. Carvalho Dias (Lisbon, 2020), no. 22.
THE BATTLE OF IBERA AT WHICH THE ROMANS DEFEATED HASDRUBAL: a miniature from Jean Miélot’s (d. 1472) translation of Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola (d. 1388), Romuléon, in French, illuminated manuscript on vellum[Eastern France (Langres), 15th century (c. 1480–85)]
a cutting, c.130 × 100 mm, trimmed to the edge of the miniature, the reverse with 21 lines of text in a rounded bâtard script, describing Postumus’s death, and how the Boii returned the spoils, including a paragraph beginning ‘Les Boyens emporterent ses despouilles et son chief a leur temple …’, the miniature depicting Posthumus, on horseback, being struck in his shoulder with a lance held by the foremost of a group of knights in armour, two holding standards with the black imperial two-headed eagle on a gold background, with broken weapons and wounded men in the foreground, a river flowing through the landscape in the background, a small area at the top of the miniature reserved for the rubric ‘Le xme. chap(itr)e’; a few areas of minor pigment loss, mainly at the extreme edges, otherwise in fine condition; framed.
PROVENANCERENÉ II (1451–1508), DUKE OF LORRAINE: the volume from which this cutting derives was demonstrably copied from Charles the Bold’s copy, illuminated by Loyset Liédet and dated 1464 by its scribe David Aubert (now Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS. Med. pal. 156), which was certainly owned by Renés son Anthony, Duke of Lorrraine, in 1510, just after René’s death; it must therefore surely have been part of the booty, the Burgunderbeute, captured by René in his series of victories in battle over Charles the Bold, culminating in the latter’s defeat and death at Nancy in 1477 (McKendrick, 2012). At least two other miniatures were cut out and acquired by 1847 by the Musée Cluny, Paris (Cl. 886; Du Sommerard, 1847), and all the others were cut out by 1884, when the parent volume was given to the municipal library at Niort (where it was formerly MS 25; it is now Mediathèque, Rés. G2F), by a local judge, Edmond-Emmanuel Arnauldet (1827–1899).F. Doerling, Hamburg (said to have been acquired from Hartung & Karl, Munich); sold at Christie’s, 21 June 1989, lot 7 (col. ill.); bought by Tulkens.Sold in our rooms, 8 December 2015, lot 33 (col. ill.); bought by:The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1431.
TEXT AND ILLUMINATIONThere are two translations of Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola’s Romuléon into French; one of which was begun by Jean Miélot at the request of Philip the Good in 1460 and finished two or three years later. Only six complete manuscripts are known to exist, all made in the southern Netherlands, plus a seventh, made in France, now in Niort, from which the present cutting comes. The text has never been printed. All the Netherlandish copies, three of them written by the scribe David Aubert were apparently made for patrons in the Burgundian court. It has been shown that the French one was copied in Lorraine for René, Duke of Lorraine, from a copy he had captured in battle from Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Fourteen cuttings from the same manuscript were sold at Christie’s in 1989 (the present one being one of only two reproduced in colour), and in 1993 Nicole Reynaud attributed them to an artist working in Langres for clients in Lorraine and Champagne, c. 1480–85 (Avril & Reynaud, 1993). A few years later, François Avril recognised six more miniatures at the Museum of Enamels at Limoges (Baujard, 1997), and he has continued to expand the corpus since then, most recently with a list of additional manuscripts and an analysis of the style of the artist, whom he named the Romuléon Master (Avril, 2020). Among the manuscripts now attributed to the artist are: New York, Morgan Library, MS M.26; Karlsruhe, Badisches Landsbibliothek, MS Karlsruhe 3118; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28805; Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigi C IV 115; and London, British Library, Add. MS 15702. From the evidence provided by such manuscripts, Avril concludes that the artist trained in Paris in the 1470s, where he must have studied the work of the Master of Jacques de Besançon, but he was also familiar with the work of Jean Fouquet’s followers at Tours, and in the 1480s he worked in the East France, perhaps at Langres or Lorraine.
‘The Niort volume was once a magnificently illustrated manuscript, which may have contained as many as 75 miniatures. … Had it survived intact, this volume would have stood comparison with the grandest copies of secular texts that were illustrated in Western Europe during the last quarter of the fifteenth century’ (McKendrick, 2012, p. 73).
The present miniature was identified in 1989 as The Death of Postumus at the Hands of the Boii, and has been used since 2015 to illustrate the Wikipedia page ‘Lucius Postumius Albinus (consul 234 BC)’. The text on the reverse is from Book 5, chapter 9, and the miniature includes the rubric for chapter 10: it must therefore instead depict the battle of Ibera in 215 BC, at which the Romans under the Scipios defeated Hasdrubal and his army and thereby prevented them joining Hannibal in Italy. It comes from fol. 57 of the parent manuscript.
We are grateful to Scot McKendrick, who is currently preparing a study of this group of miniatures, for providing the correct identification of the scene.
REFERENCESE. Du Sommerard, Musée des Thermes et de l’Hôtel de Cluny: Catalogue et description des objets d’art de l’antiquité, du moyen-âge et de la renaissance, exposés au Musée (Paris, 1847), nos. 794, 804.
F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris, 1993), p. 376.
S. McKendrick, ‘The Romuléon and the Manuscripts of Edward IV’, England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, (Stamford, 1994), pp. 149–69.
S. McKendrick, ‘Charles the Bold and the Romuléon: Reception, Loss and Influence’, in Kunst und Kulturtransfer zur Zeit Karls des Kühnen, ed. by N. Gramaccini and M.C. Schurr (Bern, 2012), pp. 59–84.
F. Avril, in European Illuminated Manuscripts in the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection, ed. by J. Carvalho Dias (Lisbon, 2020), no. 22.
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