Thursday, August 5, 2021

Jean Pucelle, horse & rider - BNF Gallica manuscripts

 Salvete Omnes,

August is always a difficult month to begin, Dog days on one hand and the remembrance of the tragedy of Warsaw and her Uprising of 1944, especially mentioned on my blog the massacre and genocide of Wola district inhabitants by the Germans. 

But also  this doggy August  brings the memory of our king Sigismund II August, son of Sigismund I and Bona Sforza. Queen Bona gave birth to our future king Sigismund II August on August 1, 1520. He was a good king, he was. Yet he was unable to collect the money his mother had lent the House of Hapsburg. But he made possible the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

So going a bit medieval today, I will first comment that perusing old archives, digital archives included, is like going hunting, and from time to time sweet prizes are to be had.

By pure coincidence I came across the medieval illumination  works cumulatively known as BNF 10483-84 and attributed to a Parisian 14th century  Gothic painter Jean Pucelle, although there were other painters (3 or four) or miniaturists who worked on this two volume Breviaire de Belleville. Interestingly  this breviary was named after  this famous Breton she-wolf Jeanne de Belleville. And until the French Revolution the volumes were held in a Dominican abbey at Poissy, Ille-de-Fance.

     I corralled some of the wonderful illuminations from both volumes, there are  Biblical in literary  context(eg two miniatures of Absalom or David and Goliath) and very XIV century medieval French in material context, for our purposes bits, cinches, saddles, cloth, stirrups, weapons etc :

 







 


Enjoy

Valete


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