Master of cardinal de Bourbon
His name was inspired by the manuscript evoking the life and miracles of Saint Louis, illuminated for the cardinal and archbishop of Lyon, Charles II de Bourbon.
His style is marked by miniature frames imitating Gothic architecture, characters with strong physiques and expressive faces, a taste for detail, particularly in clothing, and a concern for realism, sometimes bloody, typical of Flemish book illumination of his time.
His style was studied in 1935 in a monograph devoted to one of his books of hours, the Un livre d'heures: manuscrit à l'usage de Mâcon, but no connection was made with his other works.
[1] In 1982, American art historian John Plummer compiled a list of four of his works, including the Siraudin hours and a pontifical in the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
[6] In the 2015 art history thesis on the Parisian bookseller Antoine Vérard, Louis-Gabriel Bonicoli extended Delaunay's conclusions concerning the engravings associated with the Master or his workshop and proposed new attributions along these lines (the resulting corpus amounts to 868 matrices, produced between 1485 and 1497).
[8] At this time, ties between the capital of Normandy and Flanders were close, and Rouen's town councilors repeatedly called on artists from the north to decorate manuscripts.
Louis, bâtard de Bourbon, lieutenant-general of Normandy and admiral of France, commissioned a manuscript on the life of Alexander, now in the Austrian National Library, in which Delaunay believed he could see the master's hand.
Louis de Gruuthuse, a prince and bibliophile from Bruges, commissioned illuminations in Rouen, in particular a miniature for a manuscript of the Livre des tournois.
The Master of the Cardinal de Bourbon was probably in Paris in the 1480s, and incorporated elements typical of local illumination into his style, such as the cloisonné layout of the miniatures, as seen in Maître François.
Charles II de Bourbon, the cardinal who gave his name to the anonymous master and commissioned the miniatures of a life of Saint Louis, was also an advisor and principal diplomatic negotiator.
Finally, close to the sovereign was Pierre d'Aubusson, Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and commissioner of a chronicle of the siege of Rhodes.
[11] Isabelle Delaunay suggests that the artist may have passed through Amiens around 1489-1490,[8] where he illuminated a book of hours and perhaps a pontifical for Pierre Versé, the city's bishop at the time.
In 1465, the cathedral's chapter called on craftsmen from Flanders and the Netherlands, and according to a document dated 1472, Guérard Louf, resident in the capital between 1466 and 1475, founded a chapel in the cemetery of the city's Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where he set up a brotherhood of the deceased, made up of painters and sculptors from the north.
[13] Furthermore, Caroline Blondeau's research into Rouen's artistic milieu in the second half of the 15th century has determined that Guérard Louf died shortly after 1478, which would invalidate Isabelle Delaunay's hypothesis.
It is a rare example of a chronicle evoking events contemporary with its writing, a veritable work of propaganda for the Order of Chivalry, designed to convince Western sovereigns to support their fight against the Turks.
[25]Fifteen books of hours have been attributed to him in whole or in part, and a sixteenth has recently been identified and acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Indeed, illuminators of the late 15th century were often also painters and suppliers of cartoons for other media such as stained glass, tapestry or engraving, as was the case with the Master of Anne de Bretagne in Paris at the same period.
Isabelle Delaunay has found the master's hand in many engravings, such as the woodcuts he may have designed for a book of hours printed by Antoine Caillaut in Paris in 1489, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Vélins 1643).
[50][51] All around the coffin in which the bishop's recumbent relies, angels and canons are depicted in trompe-l'œil, drawing a veil over the tomb and a representation of the coat of arms and the mystic lamb.
It was François Avril who first made the connection between this painting, possibly commissioned by Louis XI in the early 1480s for Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and the manuscript of La Geste de Rhodes.
show the same general view of the siege of the island and the fortified city; moreover, the two works are characterized by very similar topographical precision and an almost identical Flemish-inspired treatment of the figures and atmospheric perspective.
