The Casanatense Missal (ms. 1909) and the Bimillenary of Nijmegen
The initiative of the Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen to celebrate the second millennium of the birth of the oldest Dutch city with various cultural events has seen the revival and study of the golden age of Flemish miniature painting take center stage.
“I fratelli Limbourg. I maestri di Nimega alla corte di Francia ” is the title of the international exhibition held in Nijmegen from 30 August to 20 November 2005, which proved to be a somewhat unique event for lovers of figurative arts linked to medieval-humanistic books, of which the famous artists of Gelderland were witnesses at the highest level. Paul, Herman and Johan de Limbourg, famous throughout the world for having illuminated precious books of hours for the powerful Duke Jean de Berry, were born in Nijmegen at the end of the 15th century.
Les très Riches Heures
: The miniatures of Les très Riches Heures (Chantilly, Musée Condé) and Les Belles Heures (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Arts) are considered the “absolute apogee of medieval painting” by art historians and scholars in the field, masterpieces of the art of miniature that still today exceptionally reproduce the image of religious, aristocratic and daily life in the Middle Ages. The project and the realization of the exhibition immediately aroused enthusiasm and was a huge success. A specialized exhibition, apparently intended for an audience of amateurs and professionals, it actually recorded a varied and much higher influx of visitors than expected. The secret was in having been able to reawaken curiosity towards a distant “beauty”, to be rediscovered, presenting not only a surprising quantity and quality of objects, but contextualizing it in its land of origin, small, circumscribed in the territory of Gelderland, but large, spacious in its cultural horizons. A sort of global world of late medieval European art.
This is why, on the occasion of the exhibition, conferences were organized in collaboration with the University of Nijmegen, study seminars to delve into the various historical-artistic aspects, aimed above all at the links between miniature painting in the Duchy of Gelderland and the Ile de France and from there with the Northern European artists who were most connected with that area. Contemporary archive documents were also lent exclusively and displayed in the showcases to integrate a path of great visual impact, thus facilitating the historical-educational interaction.
Visitors were able to admire, for the first and last time, pieces of rare beauty and certainly never to be enjoyed again outside their home, such as, for example, the manuscript of Les Belles heures, preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York, an extraordinary example and almost never shown to the public.
The manuscript, currently being restored, is temporarily in pieces: thanks to this unique circumstance, the Museum Het Valkhof has obtained the loan and the permission to exhibit ten pages with 17 splendid miniatures, one next to the other.
The exceptional nature of the event has allowed the Museum to host masterpieces not only produced by the Limbourgs and preserved in various parts of the world but also a considerable series of paintings, metal engravings, sculptures and decorative arts that are naturally connected to them by area of production or commission.
And, among these, the Casanatense 1909 manuscript had the privilege of being part of the cultural project, thanks to its area of belonging and its singular history.
Better known in the exhibition as the “Casanatense Missal”, the 1909 ms. is certainly of Franco-Flemish origin.
From the first contacts with the Museum Het Valkhof in the summer of 2004, it was clear that the Casanatense codex could not have avoided the appointment in Nijmegen. An even more suggestive reason for its aristocratic birth required it among the exhibited pieces and is linked to its current lack of integrity, due to the theft of two splendid illustrated pages, which occurred in unknown circumstances at the end of the nineteenth century. Two bifolios of the manuscript, respectively with the miniature of the Crucifixion and the Divine Majesty, were removed with the clear intention of putting such a valuable and sure-fire stolen good on the market.
Chance wanted the two stolen miniatures to end up through official channels at the Royal Collection in Windsor, where they are still preserved today. What better occasion for a “virtual” recomposition of the Missal than the exhibition in honor of the Limbourgs in Nijmegen?
In fact, being able to admire the stolen miniatures again next to the manuscript to which they belonged was not only a splendid idea, but also exciting.
That the ms. 1909 was a luxury manuscript was already known, but, in all honesty, it was thanks to Dutch scholars that on this occasion a story of “ordinary madness” among the thieves of works of art was reconstructed. But, at this point, what does the “Missal” have in common with the Limbourgs?
First of all, the patronage. The Casanatense Missal is also linked to the entourage of the Duke of Berry, with alternating events and changes of ownership. It is a magnificent manuscript that provides with great evidence those cosmopolitan links between the court painters of Gelderland around 1400 that extended from the Rhineland to Paris, Avignon and England.
Before being dismantled, the Missal included the two full-page miniatures (Canone Missae), 65 historiated initials, placed to divide the texts, 12 small miniatures in the Calendar. Numerous and rich in gold are the ornate initials, scattered to decorate almost all the pages of the manuscript. The Missal certainly remained intact until 1864, the year in which the publisher Henry Léon Curmer published in Paris the Evangiles des dimanches, where he reproduced a series of miniatures taken from famous codices and where the two miniatures of the Canon of the Casanatense Missal appear, with clear reference to the codice and the Library. But, just a few years later, between 1872 and 1878, the last Casanatense prefect Pio Tommaso Masetti, describing the ms. 1909 in his inventory, gives no mention of the two illuminated pages, which suggests that he no longer had them before his eyes … From then until 1987 no further news had leaked out.
Coat of arms of Pierre de Beaujeu
Both the pages of the Canon and other pages of the codex are adorned with the coat of arms of Pierre de Beaujeu (1438-1503), son of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy and husband of Anne of France, daughter of Louis XI.
The Missal had previously belonged to Jacques d’Armagnac, Duke of Nemours (1433-1477), and great-grandson of Jean de Berry but the Armagnac coat of arms is now illegible under the Beaujeu coat of arms.
Factional struggles at the court of France meant that our Missal passed from the House of Armagnac, as “spoils of war”, to Pierre de Beaujeu.
Its origin, once attributed to the entourage of the Duke of Berry, a great bibliophile and a high-ranking patron, is rather dubious. It is however certain that the codex was part of the collection of the Duke of Nemours, as evidenced by some initial letters on the edge of the manuscript binding, “Ioan” and “RVDF” (probably an abbreviation of the motto), which claim its belonging to the duke’s library, because they are present in all his books. This obligatory passage through the “history” of our Missal is necessary to better clarify the artistic relationships with the school in which it was produced and to which the other famous manuscripts made for the Duke of Berry are linked, in particular those illuminated by the Limbourgs. It is also known that it was commissioned by a clergyman, probably Jean d’Armagnac, who died in 1408, bishop of Mende, great-uncle of Jacques.
The Missal is a luxury manuscript whose production dates back to the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century.
The interest aroused among historians of miniature necessarily focuses on the interweaving of stylistic influences that make it an important witness of study.
From Avignon to the Rhine-Dutch area, to Bohemia, and finally to Gelderland, its decoration traces a path of artistic techniques that dialogue with each other and at the same time lead back to a specific production of the French area. Some characteristics of its ornamentation, such as the delicately archaic style, indicate that it was produced in the provinces and not in Paris; the thin margins, with small and symmetrical ivy bunches, recall those manuscripts such as the Très Belles Heures de Notre Dame (National Library of Paris), but are somewhat less refined.
An important link with the Missal is constituted by a small group of works from the North of the Netherlands, the most significant of which is the Gelre Wapenboek, a collection of coats of arms and historical texts written at the end of the fifteenth century. The page with the Maestà, for example, recalls the famous painting of the Holy Roman Emperor, full page, illuminated on the third sheet of the Wapenboek, written between 1386 and 1397. Finally, the evident reference to the Pietà by the painter Jean Malouel, exhibited in the Louvre, associates the Missal with the artists of Gelderland.
These reports portray Gelderland no longer “as an artistic province between Utrecht and Paris”, but as a rich and influential centre of manuscript illumination at the beginning of the 15th century.
Beyond the visual impact, which plays such an important role in the approach to figurative art, the exhibition of the “Missale Casanatense” in Nijmegen proposes themes of study and cultural curiosities, linked not only to the artistic aspect of the codex but also to its historical story, underlining once again how useful it is to exhibit not only to “show”, but above all to stimulate the study and research of “that which does not appear”.
The images illustrating the editorial reproduce the Ms 1909 and other manuscripts cited in the text
To find out more:
L. Curmer Les évangiles des dimanches et fêtes de l’annés, Paris 1864, pp. 40, 116, 139
M. Adorisio An illuminated missal donated to Jean de Berry and now in the Casanatense Library in Rome, in Miscellanea in memoria di Giorgio Cencetti, Turin, 1973, pp. 293-315
J. F. Hamburger, The Casanatense Missal and Painting in Guelders in the Early Fifteenth Century, “Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch”, 48/49 (1987-88), pp. 7-44
J. F. Hamburger The Casanatense and the Carmelite Missals: Continental sources for English Manuscript illumination of the Early fifteenth Century, in Van der Horst and Klamt 1991, pp. 161-173
J. Stratford Manuscript Fragments at Windsor Castle and the Entente Cordiale, in “Linda L. Brownrigg and Margaret M.Smith (eds.)”, Los Haltos Hills and London 2000, pp. 115-35
The Limbourg Brothers. Nijmegen Masters at the French Court 1400-1416 .
Rob Dückers, Peter Roelofs, Ludion 2005