PERIODICALS
GAZETTE DES BEAUX ARTS.—The April number opens with an article by M. Salomon Reinach, in which he brings to light a great unknown miniaturist whom he identifies with the painter Simon Marmion, known as the author of the altarpiece of St. Bertin, now in the castle of Wied. Of this magnificent and little-known work the National Gallery possesses two fragments representing a chorus of angels rejoicing at the birth of the saint and two angels carrying his soul up to heaven, a strange and imaginative composition, in which the ridge of a roof cutting into the base of the composition gives an effect of supernatural strangeness. The manuscript in which the miniatures in question occur is in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, and has remained till now unnoticed. It is in the main the French compilation entitled the ‘Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denys,’ but the history is continued with extracts from various historians to the beginning of the reign of Charles V. It contains fifteen full-page miniatures which are of quite extraordinary merit, and which may be by Simon Marmion. The smaller miniatures are by another hand, and are distinctly inferior. The most interesting of the miniatures is the title-page representing Fillastre, Abbot of St. Bertin, offering the Grandes Chroniques to Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, by whose side stands the aged Chancellor Rollin; behind stand three figures, among which M. Reinach recognizes the youthful Charles the Bold and the Grand Bâtard. The heads are admirably rendered, and show that Marmion, if it be indeed he, must be reckoned as one of the great masters of portraiture of a school in which portraiture attained to the utmost perfection. The landscapes are, however, scarcely less remarkable. They do not, of course, rise quite to the height of imaginative realism shown in the Hubert van Eyck miniatures published by M. Durrieu, but they are conceived in a similar vein and executed with absolute mastery. If M. Reinach’s conjecture is correct, and it rests on a number of subsidiary proofs besides the likeness of style to the Wied altarpiece, he has done a great service in bringing to light the work of a great artist whose reputation as a miniaturist was such that his name was coupled with that of Fouquet in the eulogies of contemporary poets. Marmion was born at Amiens about 1420. In 1454 he was at Lille employed by the Duke of Burgundy, but he seems to have worked chiefly at Valenciennes. His style shows the influence of the Van Eycks, and still more of Van der Weyden. But there is, we think, in his manner of composition, and in the freedom of his fancy, something which distinguishes him from the pure Flemish painters, something which is due to his French origin and early training. ¶ The next article by M. Casimir Stryienski is concerned with French art of a very different kind. There exist a number of catalogues of the early exhibitions of the Salon, illustrated throughout with minute sketches by Gabriel de St. Aubin. The author has had the idea of reconstructing by the aid of one of these catalogues the Salon of 1761, and discussing the subsequent history of the various works. Many of these are quite lost, and survive only in St. Aubin’s marvellous sketches. Delicate as St. Aubin’s more serious work is, as a tour de force nothing could equal the dexterity of these minute notes. Between two lines of the catalogue he will insert a whole row of sketches, in which not only the composition but some suggestion of the chiaroscuro of the originals is given. Many of the works of Vien, J. B. M. Pierre, Vanloo, and Hallé make a more pleasing impression when interpreted thus than the originals can have done. ¶ M. André Michel, who carries on the work inaugurated by the genius of Courajod, commences a series of articles on the acquisitions made by his department of the Louvre. The finest of these came from Courajod’s collection, and include a wooden crucifix of the twelfth century, in which we can trace the first germs of the new sentiment for life and dramatic expressiveness working in the old hieratic formula. The exquisite statue of a man of the thirteenth century, also in wood, shows the new art arrived already at perfect command of the means of expression, but still restrained by a reminiscence of earlier schematic treatment. This and the stone statue of St. Geneviève show French sculpture at a point which it has never surpassed. The fifteenth and sixteenth century sculptures which have been added to the national collection, though of great beauty, have nothing of the supreme sense of design of the earlier work. ¶ M. F. de Mely publishes two sarcophagi with figures in relief discovered at Carthage. In spite of Greek and Egyptian influences the author considers that at least one of the figures, that of the priestess, bears the impress of a special racial type, and he considers that this and the Elche head taken together give us an idea of a distinctively Punic ideal type. M. Pierre Gusman describes, without adding anything very new, the Villa Madama, and M. André Pascal begins an account of the eighteenth century sculptor Pierre Julien.
In the May number Monsieur Gaston Migeon, who has done much towards the classification of Mahommedan copper work, writes on the Exhibition of Mahommedan Art recently held at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in the Pavillon de Marson. Several remarkable specimens of copper work are reproduced, perhaps the most interesting being that lent by M. Sarre which is supposed to date from the first years of the Hegira, and to be of Sassanian workmanship. Some fourteenth-century Persian velvets and tissues of singularly fine and naturalistic design are also figured, as well as two splendid Indo-Persian miniatures from the collection of M. Bing. ¶ In his second and concluding article on the acquisition of the department of sculpture in the Louvre, M. André Michel describes a remarkable polychrome wooden statue of the beginning of the sixteenth century belonging to the Franconian school. In this the author finds the influence of Albert Dürer. It is certainly a more deliberate and scientific work of art than the majority of Franconian sculptures of the period. Several works by Houdon, Deseine and Clodion are also described and reproduced. The prints of the Dutuit Collection are described in a brilliant and humorous article by M. Henri Bouchot, in which he concerns himself more with the collector than the collection, which is in fact rather remarkable for the number of prints of ascertained pedigree than for its artistic character. M. Pascal completes in this number his study of Pierre Julien.
JAHRBUCH DER KUNSTHISTORISCHEN SAMMLUNGEN DES ALLERHÖCHSTEN KAISERHAUSES. Band XXIII, Heft 5.—The present fascicule is devoted entirely to researches by Herr Julius von Schlosser on ‘Artistic Tradition in the late Middle Ages.’ Under this title the author brings together several separate researches; the connexion between them lies in their illustration of the contrast between mediaeval art with its direct visual symbolizing of ideas and the Renaissance and modern habits of actual imitation of natural forms. ¶ The first of his researches is concerned with a large illuminated parchment, too large to have formed part of a book and probably meant to be framed and hung on a wall. It depicts in the centre the Nativity, around which, in a large number of medallions enclosed in late Gothic scrollwork, are represented the various analogies by which the immaculate conception was rendered credible. It is an early example of the ‘Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis beatae Mariae,’ in which the miracle is rendered plausible by a record of all the miraculous things in nature. The origin and propagation of this popular form of doctrinal exegesis is discussed. The author of the ‘Defensorium,’ Franciscus of Retz, was a Dominican, and professed theology in the University of Vienna from 1385 to 1411. The earliest illustrated version is the manuscript of Frater Antonius of Tegernsee of 1459, and the work was published as a block-book as early as 1470. The best-known is Eysenhut’s block-book of 1471, of which the British Museum possesses a copy. In the early sixteenth century it was published also in a French translation at Rouen, but it was most popular in Bavaria and Austria. The parchment picture of the Vienna Hofmuseum, which forms the subject of these researches, is, the author considers, by an Austrian artist of the latter half of the fifteenth century. ¶ Of greater artistic merit are the small folding tablets of the Vienna Hofmuseum, in which are depicted a series of men and animals which served as patterns for artists. There are, for instance, the heads of Christ, the Virgin, and St. John, in poses which show that they would serve for a Crucifixion; there is the Veronica, and a number of varied types which experience and tradition showed were likely to be useful to an artist. It is certainly a striking example of the essentially practical methods of artistic production at a time when painting was an actual necessity, and when, therefore, the picture was of more importance than the artist’s personality. This work belongs to about the year 1400. ¶ Another artist’s pattern-book discussed by Herr von Schlosser, though this has already been published in part, is that used by the miniaturists of a Rhenish monastery, now in the Hofbibliothek at Vienna. This contains, besides initials and borders, the traditional receipts for various animals both real and fabulous. This the author compares with Villars de Honnecourt’s famous sketch-book and the similar pattern-book of Stephen of Urach in Munich. Villars de Honnecourt, however earlier in date, had indeed much more than a merely practical aim in view. He had already begun those researches into the laws of proportion and harmony in natural form which later on absorbed Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer. ¶ Herr von Schlosser aptly concludes this part of his researches by a reproduction of an Attic vase in Berlin, on which is represented the workshop of a vase maker with the pattern receipts for gods and animals hanging on the wall. ¶ Finally, in an appendix, Herr von Schlosser discusses Giusto of Padua’s frescoes of the virtues in the Eremitani at Padua, which have recently been relieved in part of their covering of whitewash. He reproduces the two best preserved figures. Here again the question is of the rôle played by a traditional pattern-book, for there exist similar representations of the virtues in manuscripts at Florence and Vienna, while recently Signor Venturi has acquired for the national collection at Rome another version, which he considers is Giusto of Padua’s own sketch-book and the model for the frescoes. Herr von Schlosser shows, we think conclusively, that this is of later origin by a belated Giottesque of the early fifteenth century, while he brings forward as the original of the whole series a MS. at Chantilly by Bartolommeo de’ Bartoli, executed in all probability between 1353 and 1356 in Bologna.
REPERTORIUM FÜR KUNSTWISSENSCHAFT. 1903. Part II.—Constantin Winterberg continues his minute analysis of Albert Dürer’s theory of the proportions of the figure. In this article he deals with the second book, and shows how Dürer freed himself increasingly from the traditional mediaeval canon and sought to establish his theory on inductive lines. ¶ Mr. Campbell Dodgson publishes a transcript of David de Necker’s preface to the Landsknechts, from which it appears that the original drawings were by Hans Burkmair, Christopher Amberger, and Jörg Breu, and were engraved by Jost de Necker, David’s father. This settles a much-disputed point, and shows that Beham, to whom a number of the originals were ascribed, must be excluded altogether. ¶ Count Luigi Manzoni writes on the stained glass in Perugia in the quattrocento, and in particular on the great window in S. Domenico, which he ascribes in part to Fra Bartolommeo di Pietro Accomandati, who appears to have worked in stained glass already in the fourteenth century at a time when most Italian towns were forced to employ foreigners for such work. The greater part of the window was executed, according to the author, in the second half of the fifteenth century, and by the painter Benedetto Bonfigli. ¶ In this number Dr. Friedländer concludes his notices of the Bruges Exhibition. He deals with Albert Cornelis, an artist who was first recognized by Mr. James Weale, and with Jan Provost, with regard to whom he follows M. G. Hulin. He agrees therefore in giving to the artist, Mr. Sutton-Nelthorpe’s Legend of St. Francis. More surprising is his suggestion that the Madonna, lent by Madame André under the name of Van Eyck, which was reproduced in the April number of The Burlington Magazine, is a youthful work of Jan Provost. With regard to Jan van Eeckele, the author maintains a sceptical attitude. He supposes the signature J.V.E. attached to certain works to be forgeries intended for Jan Van Eyck. After discussing the works of the later Flemish and Dutch artists, Dr. Friedländer discourses on the works which are not of purely Flemish origin. Among them the most interesting was the so-called Antonello da Messina, lent by Baron d’Albenas, representing the Pietà. This, following M. Hulin, Dr. Friedländer gives to a French artist, and dates about 1470. The mixture of Italian and Flemish influence in this work is, we think, of quite a different kind from that found in French works of the period.
RASSEGNA D’ARTE.—To the April number M. George le Brun contributes an enthusiastic, though by no means exaggerated, appreciation of the elder Breughel, ‘the only artist of his time who knew how to withstand the enchantments of the Italian masters,’ though he too travelled in Italy. Signor Enrico Cavilia calls attention to the imposing ruins of the basilica at Squillace which he ascribes to about the year 600. If this is accurate it becomes, after St. Abbondio at Como, the earliest example of a basilica in the form of a Latin cross. This important example of early Christian architecture has been little noticed hitherto. Signor Rivoira, for example, makes no mention of it. ¶ A small piece of stuff with a woven pattern of figures, rabbits, birds, and ornamental intreccie, which was found at Modena in 1900, forms the subject of an article by Isabella Errera. This has hitherto been supposed to be of Byzantine workmanship, but the author by comparison with other pieces of similar design and workmanship ascribes it to Arab workmen under Byzantine influence.
In the May number Signor Paoletti publishes an ancona (insufficiently reproduced) by Jacobello Bonomo. This ancona in its original carved frame is dated 1385, and is important as showing how early the traditional form of the ancona as it appears in the works of the Muranese school was fixed. This indeed differs but slightly from the altarpieces of Antonio da Murano in Sta. Zaccharia at Venice, which are dated nearly half a century later. ¶ Signor Ricci continues to elucidate the little-known Giovanni Francesco da Rimini, an artist of the Romagna influenced by Benedetto Bonfigli, and through him deriving many motives which recall the work of Filippo Lippi. These are specially noticeable in the Baptism belonging to Signor Blumenstihl at Rome. The other picture, which he attributes to this mediocre but agreeable painter, is a Madonna adoring the Infant Saviour which is No. 255 of the Bologna Gallery. ¶ Signor Augusto Bellini Pietri discourses on the frescoes of S. Piero a Grado which were brought to light in 1885 at Cavalcaselle’s instigation. Cavalcaselle himself judged of them as feeble productions of the early Pisan school which might be connected with the name of Giunta Pisano. He failed to see traces of true Byzantine influence. Signor Pietri’s view practically coincides with this, except that he considers them of much greater artistic significance and as indicating the dawn of the new Italian spirit, the beginnings of a dramatic and expressive art as opposed to the hieratic and purely architectonic character of the Byzantine. ¶ Signor Ricci calls attention to an interesting portrait of Luca Pacioli acquired by the Naples Gallery with a Cartellino bearing the inscription JACO. BAR. VIGENNIS. 1495. If vigennis is a corruption of ventenne, and if Jaco. Bar. stands for Jacopo de Barbari, it brings that artist’s birth down to a much later period than has hitherto been assumed. Unfortunately Signor Ricci does not indicate how far the painting in question conforms to the manner of Jacopo de Barbari’s known works. ¶ Signor Ferrari announces the installation of the new museum at Piacenza, and describes its two chief treasures, the Christ at the Column by Antonello da Messina and the tondo (poorly reproduced), which is ascribed, somewhat rashly we think, to Botticelli himself.
ONZE KUNST contains two articles by Max Rooses; in one he describes the Pacully collection in Paris, which has recently come into the market, and, à propos of the picture of a young woman writing, by the Master of the half-figures, which was exhibited at Bruges, makes a suggestion that possibly the half-figure pictures were executed by Jan Matsys when he was absent from the Netherlands, and may have come into connexion with Clouet’s school in France. The colour scheme and scale of modelling of Jan Matsys’s signed Lucretia is, we should have thought, quite distinct from that of the half-figure pictures. ¶ In the second article the author makes known a Rubens belonging to the Countess Constantin de Bousies. The picture is of a satyr pressing grapes into a cup held by a young satyr; in the foreground a tigress is suckling her young. M. Rooses declares this to be the original of the similar picture at Dresden.
ATENEUM. HELSINGFORS.-No. 1 contains an article on mediaeval art in Finland with illustrations of sculptures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which shows how closely the types of early French and German Gothic sculptures were followed. The St. Margaret from Vemo has almost the grace and ease of movement and the large disposition of draperies of the best French work of the end of the thirteenth century. The later work indicates more clearly German influence. Osvald Siren publishes two Florentine Madonna reliefs, at present in Sweden. One is a stucco copy of a relief by Desiderio, lately in the possession of Mrs. Pepys Cockerell.
THE REVUE DE L’ART contains some illustrations from the Pacully collection, and the record by M. Paul Vitry of an interesting discovery, an almost contemporary copy of a lost portrait of the Comte de Dunois, the original probably being by Jean Fouquet.
L’ART, for April, contains a number of reproductions of mediaeval works by royal and titled amateurs, an article on the Museum of Tapestry at the Gobelins factory, one on Horace Vernet as a caricaturist, and one on the exhibition of the Société National des Beaux-Arts, remarkable for its violent and ill-judged attack on Rodin, à propos of the fact that he is not exhibiting this year.
THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, May, is mostly devoted to contemporary architecture, but contains the second part of Mr. Lethaby’s article on ‘How Exeter Cathedral was Built,’ with many illuminating remarks on mediaeval methods of work; not the least interesting is the suggestion that when columns of Purbeck marble were ordered from Corfe, the designs of mouldings and sections were left to the Corfe masons.
R. E. F.
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR BÜCHERFREUNDE, April, 1903.—The first number of the seventh annual volume of this periodical opens with a detailed account by H. A. L. Degener of the John Rylands Library at Manchester. The building is described and the history of its foundation related. The biography of John Rylands himself is followed by an interesting account of the founders of the Althorp collection, now incorporated, through the munificence of Mrs. Rylands, with the other contents of the palatial building at Manchester. The purchase of the Crawford collection of MSS. by Mrs. Rylands is duly recorded, and a good summary is given of the most important treasures of the library in the way of block-books and incunabula, with special attention to the books from early English presses. The article is illustrated with sketches of the building and facsimiles of rare specimens of printing. An article follows on the contemporary book-decorator, Hugo Hoppener, whose pseudonym is Fidus. His work is unknown in this country, and such specimens as are given do not inspire us with any desire for a closer acquaintance with it. Modern printing in Russia is described by P. Ettinger, and there is a review of two important facsimiles of block-books recently published by Heitz, and edited by Professor W. L. Schreiber, the ‘Twelve Sibyls,’ at St. Gallen, and the edition of the ‘Biblia Pauperum,’ in fifty leaves, at Paris. A specimen of each facsimile accompanies the review.
C. D.