Beschreibung:

THE BATTLE OF GERONIUM: 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 × 100mm, the reverse with a blank upper margin and 18 lines of text in a fine, rounded, bâtarde script (from ‘logis au mont alban …’, to ‘… et les rommains retournerent en’), the front with an arch-topped miniature depicting, in the foreground, a man charging on horseback with a lance, and an army of mounted soldiers in armour behind him, one on a white horse with red trappings, the same(?) army and horse seen in the right background, watching a battle at the foot of a hill, with men fighting and dead bodies on the ground, in the background a blue landscape of cities, hills, and a river; small area of pigment-loss, notably at the upper left corner of the miniature; framed.
PROVENANCERENÉ II (1451–1508), DUKE OF LORRAINE: the volume from which this cutting derives was copied for René 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 René’s son Anthony, Duke of Lorraine, in 1510; it must therefore 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 miniatures cut from the manuscript were acquired by 1847 by the Musée Cluny, Paris (Cl. 886; Du Sommerard, 1847), and all the others were certinly 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, part of lot 8 (ill.); bought by Quaritch.Sold at Christie’s, 15 November 2006, lot 5 (col. ill.); bought by Maggs.The property of a private consignor’, sold at Christie’s, 8 December 2016, lot 33 (col. ills.), doubtless to:Les Enluminures: exhibited by them at Masterpiece, London, in July 2017 and, according to a label on the reverse of the frame, at the Arkansas Arts Center, November 2017 – January 2018; bought by:The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1441.
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).
This miniature was previously identified as Hannibal defeating the Romans, but 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: it is in fact the battle of Geronium, in which the Romans under the consul Minucius attacked Carthaginians on a hill and thereby fell into a trap set for them by Hannibal. It comes from fol. 44 of the parent manuscript.
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.