OLIVIER DE LA MARCHE (c.1422-1502), Le chevalier délibéré, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM -

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Sale 7760
Valuable Manuscripts and Printed Books
24 November 2009
London, King Street

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OLIVIER DE LA MARCHE (c.1422-1502), Le chevalier délibéré, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM
Brussels, 1547i + 68 folios. 1-3⁸, 4⁷, 8⁸, 9⁴, 10⁹, COMPLETE, each page without illustration with three verses of 8 lines written in black ink in an elegant lettre bâtarde between two verticals and 26 horizontals ruled in brown, text justification: 160 x 75mm, rubrics of red, one-line versals of liquid gold on grounds of red, green or blue, two- and three-line twiggy initials in camaïeu d'or, SIXTEEN LARGE MINIATURES either full-page or above one verse, interleaving of paper before each miniature (small pigment losses, offsetting and spotting to title-page, light smudging to miniature on f.19v, a few other slight losses or smudges, spotting at edge of lower margins ff.9-11). English 18th-century red morocco elaborately tooled in gilt, spine in six compartments with black lettering-piece (joints cracked and split at head, corners scuffed).
PROVENANCE:
The manuscript was written in Brussels in 1547: Scriptum Bruxellae Anno Millesimo/Quingentesimo Quadragesimo VII (f.65v). It was most probably made for someone at the Habsburg court, and may even have been commissioned by, or on behalf of, Charles V (1500-1558) himself. Around this date the Emperor was evidencing a keen interest in this moral treatise that memorialised his ancestors, including Charles the Bold after whom he was named. He composed his own Castilian prose translation, which was put into verse by Hermanno de Acuna by December 1552 and printed in Antwerp the following year. An illuminated manuscript of this translation, along with an illuminated copy of the French original, were among the thirty or so non-liturgical books that accompanied Charles when he retired to the Jheronimite monastery at Yuste in 1556 to prepare for death. Both passed to his son, Philip II, and were auctioned after Philip's death in 1598. (J.L. Gonzalo Sanchez-Molero, El César y los libros: un viaje a través de las lecturas del emperador desde Gante a Yuste, 2008 pp.321-23). It is not known when Charles V acquired his illuminated manuscript copy of the original Chevalier délibéré. Presumably it was used for his translation, produced around 1550, but it was not listed among his books in Brussels in 1545 and does not appear in his earlier inventories. It has not hitherto been identified.
George Watson Taylor M.P. (1770-1841): his sale, Evans, 14 April 1823, lot 335, the second part of the dispersal of his noted library, including incunabula on vellum and paper, necessitated by the growing inadequacy of his wife's Jamaican fortune to support his extravagance.
Sir Henry Hope Edwardes, 10th Bart (1829-1900) of Wootton Hall, Ashbourne, Derbyshire: his armorial bookplate inside upper cover.

CONTENT:
Olivier de la Marche: Le Chevalier délibéré, in 338 verses, ff.1-65v.

Olivier de la Marche, loyal servant to the Dukes of Burgundy and their Habsburg successors, composed his chivalric version of the Ars moriendi, or Art of Dying, in the aftermath of the unexpected death of Mary of Burgundy in March 1482. Just over five years earlier her father, Charles the Bold, had been killed in the battle of Nancy, where de la Marche escaped death but was taken prisoner. De la Marche's final verse gives the date of completion as April 1483 and ends with his motto Tant a souffert, in this manuscript underlined in red, followed by his name La Marche (f.65v). Within the poem, he plays on his name in stanza 337 (f.65v) and his identity as the author, l'Acteur is asserted in the final miniature where he lies in a bed decorated with his motto (f.56). For a modern edition and English translation of the poem, see Olivier de la Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré (The Resolute Knight), Carleton W. Carroll ed., 1999.

Renowned as the most vivid recorder of the court of Burgundy in the days of its splendour, de la Marche was moved to an elegiac contemplation of death by his own advancing years as well as by the fragility of the ducal dynasty. As the Resolute Knight, he encounters various personifications in his quest against Atropos, or Death, and her chief henchmen, Debility, vanquisher of Philip the Good of Burgundy, and Accident, triumphant over Charles the Bold and Mary. Among them, Fresh Memory encourages him to review the great men of the past, including many of his contemporaries in a roll call of the Burgundian court, while the hermit, Understanding, instructs him how to vanquish Death: by showing himself worthy of sharing in Christ's triumph over death, he can achieve eternal life and an end of worldly sorrows.

The work was very popular, rapidly going into print with the first known edition appearing in Paris in 1488. Numerous editions followed from French presses, some with titles naming the downfall of Charles the Bold to emphasise the Burgundian content. A slightly different version of the text was printed in Gouda (c.1489) with dramatically accomplished woodcuts, reused for the edition printed in Schiedam (c.1498), the version apparently followed in the present lot. Bibliophiles still demanded manuscripts, with a group of illustrated copies created in France towards1500 for such patrons as Louis Malet de Graville, admiral of France (Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms 507). Seventeen manuscripts were listed by Carroll, all in institutional collections; to these can be added the present lot, illuminated on parchment, and a paper copy with colour washed drawings datable to the 1480s (Jörn Günther Antiquariat, Catalogue 8, Hamburg, 2006, no 32). Translations further extended its readership: two Dutch translations were published, in Schiedam (1503) and Leiden (1508), and two English translations were made from the Spanish in the second half of the 16th century. The success of the Spanish translations extended the text's life into the 17th century and the age of Cervantes, whereas the last French edition appeared in 1540.

The date of 1547 and the Brussels origin of the present lot associate this luxurious manuscript with the popularity of the text in the circles around Charles V. In that year the Emperor himself was engaged in his successful campaigns against the Lutheran princes of the Empire but his sister, Mary of Hungary, left Brussels to join him in Augsburg in November 1547 and Charles returned to the Netherlands the following year.

ILLUMINATION:

Olivier de la Marche himself intended the vivid imagery of his poem to be given visual form. His detailed instructions for fifteen miniatures, complete with the inscriptions identifying the allegorical figures and accoutrements, survive in three, unillustrated, manuscripts, presumably deriving from the author's own minute or draft. One of these, Paris, BnF ms fr. 1606, may have been used for the paper copy with Jörn Günther, where the eleven remaining drawings follow the instructions closely but somewhat clumsily. Despite its early date, this comparatively cheap manuscript did not act as a model for other copies, whose artists tended to look to the printed editions. The miniatures of the present lot, one of only five manuscripts with all fifteen subjects of the instructions, follow the exceptional woodcuts from the Gouda and Schiedam publications, an independent interpretation of de la Marche's specifications. The author may have been involved in the design process: his instructions were not printed with the text of the poem yet were closely followed; the colouring of the cuts in the one known copy of the Gouda edition accords with his wishes (Jörn Günther Antiquariat, Catalogue 9, 2006, no 41); the prefatory cut of the Knight confronting Death, not envisaged in his written instructions, is a strikingly successful encapsulation of the whole work.

It was not unusual for discerning patrons to want manuscript copies of works available in print. Much of the famous library of Philip the Good's bastard son, Raphael de Mercatellis (d.1508) was based on printed editions; Cardinal Albrecht if Brandenburg had Simon Bening illuminate texts copied from the products of the press. The illuminator of the present lot included all sixteen cuts of the Gouda and Schiedam editions and also had access to de la Marche's instructions, presumably in a manuscript copy. He employed blue, silver and gold for inscriptions, mostly as specified by the author, whereas, of necessity, the woodcuts printed all the inscriptions in black. This careful approach was probably required by a discriminating patron, who turned to an illuminator in the group well used to working for the Habsburg court, that around the Master of Charles V, named from the earliest of a series of books of hours made for the Emperor, Vienna, ONB, cod. 1859, completed by 1519. Active probably in Brussels, or possibly Mechelen, the group shared stylistic traits that continued into the last of the books of hours made for Charles V, datable after 1547 (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.696). Characteristic are the tall narrow format and the framing together of text and miniature without border decoration, both features of this copy of Le Chevalier délibéré, with its Brussels colophon dated 1547.

Within the circle of the Master of Charles V, the illuminator of the Chevalier délibéré is closest to, and perhaps identifiable with, the Master of Morgan M.491, named from another of the books of hours made for Charles V, with a Brussels colophon dated 1533. He was also responsible for a book of hours made for the future Emperor Ferdinand, Charles V's brother, after his election as King of the Romans in 1531 (Vienna, ONB, cod. 1875), and two further books of hours, one in the Royal Library in The Hague (ms 133 D 11) and one for the use of Besançon, written in 1535 in Barcelona, where Charles V assembled the fleet for his invasion of Tunis in that year, and so presumably for a Franche-Comtois in imperial service who brought it to the Netherlands for illumination; the arms in a lozenge indicate that his wife came from Hainault (British Library Add. ms 35218): see T. Kren and S. McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, 2003, pp.495-502. Although it is difficult to attribute miniatures that are comparatively faithful to an earlier model, the changes to the woodcut designs, as well as the painting technique in the present manuscript, accord with the work of the Master of Morgan M.491 whose activity may well have extended into the 1540s.

Many of the miniatures, most obviously ff.32 and 56, exhibit shading 'by short horizontal strokes of a dark colour in parallel series', not seen in the woodcuts, which is cited as 'one of the hall marks of his [the Master's] style' (Illuminating the Renaissance, p.498). The figures have not been reinterpreted into his more mannerist poses but his distinctive bearded facial types recur: the hermit Understanding or the Great Turk can be compared with Joseph in the Besançon Hours (see J. Backhouse, Illumination from Books of Hours, 2004, no 110). The Master is noted for his 'atmospheric and dramatic' landscapes: the woodcut landscapes are recast to give them a lower viewpoint and details are added that both decorate and structure, as in the foreground hump of grass and rocky outcrops on f.1v, which can be compared with f.50v in M.491. When possible, the climbing recession of the woodcuts is reversed to give a sunken vista falling away from a raised foreground, as in many miniatures of M.491, a device seen most attractively on f.53v, where the delightful landscape is further emphasised by turning Fresh Memory into backview.

Other variations from the woodcuts show a similarly thoughtful approach to reusing the designs in a different format some sixty years later. Sometimes, the scenes are slightly simplified to fit the smaller, narrower format but the settings are often elaborated. Interestingly, a few changes are designed to evoke the Burgundian court more obviously, while other aspects are updated: the Palace of Love has been classicised and the musicians' instruments modernised; the Author's dagged chaperon has been streamlined to coincide with the later fashion for flat hats. Thus these evocative miniatures preserve the glories of the Burgundian past while presenting an ever relevant message for contemporaries, a combination that clearly appealed to the patron of this luxurious manuscript and was highly valued by the Emperor Charles V himself.

The subjects of the miniatures are as follows:

f.1 The Chevalier délibéré, the Author, confronts the skeletal figure of Death.
f.1v The Author is instructed by Thought
f.3v Thought and two squires arm the author with the shield of Good Hope and other allegorical accoutrements for his quest against Atropos or Death
f.5v The lady Remnants of Youth separates the Author and Hutin, as they battle on horseback
f.7 The Author is welcomed by the hermit Understanding
f.8v The Author and Understanding share a meal in a garden
f.12 Understanding shows the Author the relics of famous deaths, such as Samson's column and Adonis's boar
f.17 Understanding gives the Author a new lance, Authority, to continue his quest.
f.19v The Author and Age fight on foot
f.24 The Author is welcomed to the Palace of Love by the doorkeeper, the fool Illusion, and by Desire but, prompted by Remembrance, he turns his horse away.
f.32 The lady Fresh Memory shows the Author the tombs of those ancient and modern killed by Accident or Debility, the servants of Atropos
f.42v The Author and Fresh Memory watch Philip the Good joust against Debility
f.46 They watch Charles the Bold of Burgundy, in gilded armour, lead his cavalry against Accident
f.50 They watch Mary of Burgundy, accompanied by personifications of good qualities, process beneath the spear of Atropos to her combat with Accident
f.53v Fresh Memory leaves the Author at the approaches to his château f.56 The Author, in a bed decorated with his motto Tant a souffert, is counselled by Understanding

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Books & Manuscripts

• 16th Century
• Books & Manuscripts
• illuminated manuscripts
• France

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