Primer N°5 couv Neo-Gothic_2014 30/10/2015 19:07 Page1 | 5 | 1 SERMONS primer Each volume in the series of “primers” introduces primer one genre of medieval manuscripts to a wider Laura Light audience, by providing a brief, general ALCHEMY primer | 2 introduction, followed by descriptions of the Lawrence M. Principe manuscripts and accompanied by other useful and Laura Light information, such as glossaries and suggestions LAW primer | 3 for further reading. Susan L’Engle and Ariane Bergeron-Foote Medieval-like books and manuscripts from the BESTSELLERS primer | 4 late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries Pascale Bourgain tend to get lost in the shuffle. They are not and Laura Light taken seriously by medievalists, because they | 5 NEO-GOTHIC LESENLUMINURESLTD. postdate the Middle Ages; and they are not primer Sandra Hindman 23 East 73rdStreet assimilated in a history of “modern” book with Laura Light 7thFloor, Penthouse production, because they are anachronistic. New York, NY 10021 MANUSCRIPT primer | 6 PRODUCTION Tel: (212) 717 7273 There are a great many of them. Examining a Fax: (212) 717 7278 group of just such medieval-like books, this Richard H. Rouse [email protected] N E O - G O T H I C and Laura Light Primer provides a short introduction to a complex subject: how artists, scribes, and primer | 7 DIPLOMATICS LESENLUMINURESLTD. Book Production and Medievalism publishers in France, England, Germany, and the Christopher de Hamel 2970 North Lake Shore Drive United States used the remote medieval past to and Ariane Bergeron-Foote Chicago, IL 60657 _____________________________ Tel: (773) 929 5986 articulate aesthetic principles in the book arts at forthcoming titles : Fax: (773) 528 3976 the dawn of the modern era. Our selection [email protected] covers the period from about 1840 to about primer | 8 BREVIARIES LESENLUMINURES 1920. 1, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau primer | 9 SCRIPT 75001 Paris Our title “Neo-Gothic Book Production and Tel: (33) (0)1 42 60 15 58 Medievalism” takes into account how the works Fax: (33) (0)1 40 15 63 88 primer |10 HEBREW [email protected] assembled here are united in their imaginative MANUSCRIPTS approach to the medieval past; they prompt further exploration of the meaning medieval www.lesenluminures.com | 5 www.textmanuscripts.com primer had, then and now. general editor SaLnEdSraE HNiLnUdMmaINnURES a series published by New York • Chicago • Paris Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page1 | 5 primer general editor Sandra Hindman N E O - G O T H I C Book Production and Medievalism Sandra Hindman with Laura Light a series published by LESENLUMINURES New York • Chicago • Paris Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page2 Timeline 1764, Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, first Gothic novel 1789,George Washington, first president of the United States 1789,French Revolution, meeting of the Estates-General and the storming of the Bastille 1790-1876,Ambroise Firmin Didot, French printer, publisher, and art collector 1792-1883,Auguste de Bastard d’Estang, French publisher, collector, and bibliophile 1793,King Louis XVI of France guillotined 1795, Opening of the Musée des monuments français in Paris 1796, Lithography invented by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder 1804,Napoléon Bonaparte declared emperor 1814,Restoration of the monarchy in France (Louis XVIII) 1832,Great Reform Act decreed in England 1834-1896,William Morris, English Arts and Crafts author and book-designer 1835, Restoration of Vézelay Abbey and Notre-Dame Cathedral (1845) by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) 1835, Houses of Parliament in London to be rebuilt in Gothic style 1836, Godefroy Engelmann of Mulhouse invents chromolithography 1839, Invention of practical photography by Louis Daguerre 1844-1846, William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, illustrated with photographs 1846, Trinity Church, New York City by Richard Upjohn 1848,The Communist Manifestopublished 1848, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1851-1853,John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Stones of Venice 2 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page3 1851, A. W. Pugin’s medieval court at the Great Exhibition 1851,Gustave Courbet exhibited A Burial At Ornansat the Paris Salon 1853,Second Empire in France, Louis-Napoléon declared emperor 1856, Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament 1859,Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species 1860, Facsimiles of the Hours of Anne of Brittany and Hours of Étienne Chevalier 1862, Photographic facsimile of the Grimani Breviary 1863,President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 1867,Reform Act in England extended male suffrage 1869-1882,Illustrated volumes on medieval art and life by Paul Lacroix 1870,Franco-Prussian war c. 1880-1910,Arts and Crafts movement, decorative arts inspired by the medieval past 1889-1900,Publication of L’enlumineur 1894-1910,Edvard Munch, The Scream 1905, Charles Mills Gayley (1858-1932), University of California, Berkeley, proposed a Central Bureau of Reproduction for facsimiles of manuscripts, rare books, and documents 1906,Claude Monet’s Water Liliesand Henri Matisse’s Self-Portrait in a Striped Shirt 1914, Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria; World War I 1914-1915,Missal produced by the Belgian nuns at Maredret (Morgan Library MS M.658) 1917,Russian Revolution 1919,Treaty of Versailles ends World War I 1936,Spanish Civil War 1938, The Cloisters Museum of medieval art opens in Fort Tyron Park 3 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page4 Continuing to Create the Middle Ages Indeed it seems that people like the Middle Ages ―Umberto Eco, “Dreaming the Middle Ages,” 1986 Medieval-like books and manuscripts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries tend to get lost in the shuffle. They are not taken seriously by medievalists, because they postdate the Middle Ages; and they are not assimilated in a history of “modern” book production, because they are anachronistic. There are a great many of them. Examining a group of just such medieval-like books, this Primer provides a short introduction to a complex subject: how artists, scribes, and publishers in France, England, Germany, and the United States used the remote medieval past to articulate aesthetic principles in the book arts at the dawn of the modern era. Our selection covers the period from about 1840 to about 1920. Today viewers are often surprised at how deeply and variously collectors, scholars, and the general public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about the Middle Ages. From the period of the Renaissance on, cultivated people had been taught to consider the era between the end of the Roman Empire and the fifteenth century as a “dark” age, emblematic of barbaric tastes and practices. But around the year 1750 collectors, artists, historians, and other tastemakers began to turn to the Middle Ages as a period that embodied lost social, spiritual, and cultural ideals. No simple term encompasses the expanse of ideas and agendas that came to be associated with the medieval era in the modern one. Old standards include Gothic Revival, sometimes called Neo-Gothic. Both Gothic Revival, and Neo- Gothic, often used interchangeably, generally refer to architecture (those buildings that changed the landscape of Great Britain and define the campuses of many North American universities), but they also embrace other art forms. Horace Walpole’s first Gothic novel, the Castle of Otranto, published in 1764 inaugurated Neo-Gothic literature; for Walpole and many of his successors the word “Gothic” simply meant medieval. Sir Kenneth Clark included the plastic arts as part of the Gothic Revival in his 1928 essay on the history of taste. Neo- Gothic has become a bit of a catch-all today, incorporating neo-gothic fiction, 4 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page5 neo-gothic jewelry, neo-gothic script, among other “neos.” For convenience, we have stuck with the term “Neo-Gothic” for our title. More recently, theorists, including Umberto Eco, writing about the impact of the medieval era on our modern one, also use terms such as medievalism, neo-medievalism, postmodern medievalism, and even postmodern neo-medievalism to address phenomena as diverse as Hollywood movies, video games, the Trump Tower, and television shows. Leslie J. Workman, the founding father of Medievalism as a modern discipline in the 1970s, defined it as “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages.” Long before Leslie Workman, however, in 1853, John Ruskin employed the term “medievalism” to refer to his generation’s enthusiasm for all things medieval. These days, Medievalism is so entrenched in the academy that there is a critical history of it, a resource of critical terms, a journal, blogs, and many courses in the curriculum. Our title “Neo-Gothic Book Production and Medievalism” thus takes into account how the works assembled here are united in their imaginative approach to the medieval past; it does not offer a conventional survey of the Neo-Gothic movement. Of the thirteen examples in this Primer, many include more than one work,and all are illustrated. We begin with reproductive processes created in the mid- nineteenth century – lithography, chromolithography, and photography – and we examine how these techniques (nos. 2-4) help disseminate a broader understanding of the Middle Ages, in part through the facsimile and the calligrapher’s handbook (nos. 5-6). The creation of “original” works (nos. 7-10) that are medieval in style, beginning in about the 1880s, was a natural evolution of the widespread use of reproductive processes that provided access to and a greater familiarity with a whole field of art, often only otherwise visible in museum and library reserves. They also provided a wealth of source material. So too, inevitably it would seem, the same availability of reproductive material spawned a market for fakes and forgeries, which grew up at the end of the century around 1900 (nos. 11-12). A few works speak to the continuity of the medieval era in our times well past our cut-off date of about 1920 (nos. 1 and 13). Nearly all the works included in the Primer are previously unstudied and unpublished, and they would lend themselves readily to further research, individually, or in relationship to broader topics. 5 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page6 Spanning the era from 1840 to 1920, the works in this Primer also narrate a history of art that runs parallel to the version in mainstream accounts, rounding out our understanding of artistic practice during this period. From Romanticism to Expressionism, encompassing Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and Cubism and Surrealism, conventional art history teaches this era as the period of the growth of progressive modernism in the arts, new approaches to form and color, and a new attitude toward society, in short the origins of the avant-garde. Gustave Courbet created a sensation exhibiting his A Burial at Ornansat the Paris Salon in 1851, the same year Le Finat signed sketches for the Vengeance(no. 2). Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and Henri Matisse’s Self-Portrait in a Striped Shirt bear the same dates as Clothilde Coulaux’s Missal of 1906 (no. 9). The pastels of little-known Austrian artist, Gustav Zimpel (no. 10), created in 1920 acknowledge his familiarity with Edvard Munch (The Scream, versions dating from 1894 to 1910) and other Expressionist artists. The artists discussed in this Primer – Le Finat, Avril and Racinet, Clothilde Coulaux, Prosdocimi, Napoleone Verga, and Jehanne de la Lande – are not household names compared to their contemporaries from Courbet to Picasso, and they do not warrant a wholesale revision of our art history text books. Nevertheless, the story their works tell, created outside traditional artistic circles, merits a place of its own side by side the canonical account. Entire monographs, exhibitions, and courses remain to be constructed around themes raised by some of these interesting works. The varied status, and even definition, of the “copy” in relationship to the “original” deserves closer analysis. Photography, lithography, chromolithography, tracing, free-hand drawing and painting, photocopying and scanning, digital imagery, and most recently 3-D replication are all techniques or processes used in the reproduction of art works, and they achieve very different results. Works in this Primer can be studied individually, and together, in respect to their reproduction of originals. The Fouquet volume (no. 3), for example, produced for (and by?) Léon Curmer records the variety of reproductive processes then available to the publisher. The development of the manuscript facsimile (from the Latin fac simile, or “make alike”) is a related topic. Others have already raised the problematic of the look- alike manuscript in the age of mechanical reproduction, focusing for example on 6 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page7 the famous Très Riches Heures(Camille, 1990), and suggested that reproduction sometimes reduces the work of art to an iconic status unavailable for consultation or study. The recurrent facsimiles of the Grimani Breviary (1862, 1881, 1904-1910, 1972, 2009; see no. 5) would lend themselves to a similar inquiry. The most recent facsimile of the Grimani Breviary of 2009 assures us that the original manuscript is “safely housed” in the library in Venice, but promises readers that the facsimile edition “captures all of the beauty and enchantment of this ancient manuscript.” Does it? The purpose of the miniature presented here, after one in the Grimani Breviary, remains unclear. A simple search of worldcat.org reveals many portfolio sets consisting of only a limited number of plates (usually four) reproducing the Grimani Breviary. What was their function? How and where were they sold? What techniques were used to reproduce them? Carl Nordenfalk raised some of these issues, and others, in a landmark exhibition on facsimiles in 1976 that has never really been superseded. Whole fields of research open up to enterprising teachers and students, and numerous undervalued and little-known manuscripts are available to libraries, museums, and collectors. Now is the time. “It seems that people like the Middle Ages,” so said Umberto Eco in 1986. What was true in 1986 is even truer today nearly thirty years later. Those who chronicle medievalism point to a sort of nostalgia about medieval times that indicates dissatisfaction with contemporary life. Whether or not this is the case, we can assert with some conviction that the perception the medieval has acquired is new. This perception calls into question the long-favored view that the growth and progress we associate with modernity started in the Renaissance and continued uninterrupted to the present day. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books and manuscripts presented here prompt further exploration of the meaning medieval had, then and now. Sandra Hindman Professor Emerita of Art History, Northwestern University Owner of Les Enluminures 7 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page8 | 1 ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN (cOpY AftER), Portrait of Philip the Good One leaf, tempera on parchment France (?), late eighteenth or nineteenth century This is a reasonably faithful copy in reverse of one of the most iconic Northern Renaissance portraits: Roger van der Weyden’s image of Duke Philip the Good depicted as the sovereign chief of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The original, painted c. 1445, no longer exists but a remarkably large number of copies, of different dates and with many variations, survive in museums (Madrid, Lille, Bruges, Paris, Antwerp, Dijon, and elsewhere). Established in 1430 to celebrate the Duke’s marriage to the Portuguese infanta, the chivalric order survives to the present day, its members distinguished by wearing a lavish gold necklace, from which a gold sheepskin (Jason’s conquered fleece) dangles. Roger’s image, and the copies of it, rely not so much on physiognomic likeness but on symbols of identity (the necklace), power (the signet ring), and devotion (the manuscript) to represent the duke. Finely executed with tempera on parchment, our copy must date to the late eighteenth or nineteenth century, based on scientific analysis of the pigments, which include Turner yellow and Prussian blue as well as traces of chrome in the glaze. This date speaks not to revival but rather to continuity, for there are even today living “knights” of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and manuscript copies of the statutes and lists of its members date as late as the eighteenth century. Traces of animal glue and ruling on the reverse of our delicate sheet suggest the tantalizing idea that this small image was once pasted into a book – perhaps in just such a manuscript – keeping alive the memory of the Order’s founder. DESCRIPTION: single parchment sheet, traces of script and paste on verso, excellent condition apart from folds and minor loss of pigment at the edges and corners. Dimensions 191 x 133 mm. LITERATURE: P. Cockshaw and Christiane Van den Bergen-Pantens, L’ordre de la Toison d'or de Philippe le Bon à Philippe le Beau, 1430-1505 : idéal ou reflet d’une société?, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Turnhout and Brussels, 1996; Sophie Jugie,“Les portraits des ducs de Bourgogne,” Publications du centre européen d’ètudes Bourguignonnes (XIVe-XVIe) 37 (1997), pp. 49-86; Sophie Jugie, “Les portraits des ducs de Bourgongne,” L’œuvre du mois. Musée des beaux-arts Dijon, http://mba.dijon.fr/sites/default/files/Collections/pdf/les_portraits_des_ducs_de_bourgogne.pdf 8 Primer N°5 intérieur_2015 30/10/2015 19:03 Page9