in the masons’ yard: insights from french gothic manuscript painting

In the Masons’ Yard: Insights from French Gothic Manuscript PaintingAuthor(s): Jean-Marie GuillouëtSource: Gesta, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2013), pp. 181-196Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of MedievalArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/672089 .

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v52n2, Fall 2013 In the Masons’ Yard 181

I warmly thank Patricia Stirnemann for all the help she provided me with this article, for her exigent read-throughs, and for the tremen-dous work she has done to make my English understandable. I also want to thank Erik Inglis and Robert Bork for their inestimable sugges-tions, as well as Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen for their invaluable help during the publication process.

1. Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 4.2. François Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Hazan, 2003).

Gesta v.52n2 (Fall 2013).0031-8248/2010/7703-0004 $10.00. Copyright 2013 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved.

In the Masons’ Yard: Insights from French Gothic Manuscript Painting

JEAN-MARIE GUILLoUëT Université de Nantes and Institut universitaire de France (IUF)

Abstract

One of the great iconic scenes showing the activities of a con-struction site is the well-known miniature that depicts the building of Solomon’s Temple in a copy of Flavius Josephus’s Antiquités judaïques (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247). A close examination of the image reveals its ex-ceptional accuracy: it precisely depicts the craftsmen’s work, ar-chitectural design, and technical prowess at the building site of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien in Tours. It also shows how such medieval building yards were important crossroads for the cir-culation and transmission of forms, expertise, and know-how, even between different fields of artistic production. Behind the remarkable assembly of technical, architectural, and formal ob-servations of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien lies a much deeper network of meaning regarding the artist’s technical and archi-tectural knowledge and the value that this so-called Master of the Munich Boccaccio assigned to Gothic forms.

the Building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusa-lem (Fig. 1) is one of the great iconic scenes detailing the activities of a medieval con-struction site. The image comes from a man-

uscript of The Jewish Antiquities, a work written in Greek by Flavius Josephus during the first century CE, translated into Latin in the sixth century, and then translated anonymously from the Latin into French about 1400. The fifteenth-century codex of Les antiquités judaïques, now Bibliothèque natio-nale de France, MS fr. 247, was one of two manuscripts of this text originally owned by Jean, duke of Berry; the other was Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 6446, illustrated by the Master of the Cité des Dames.

on the left side of the miniature on fol. 163r, Solomon, standing on a covered balcony at the corner of his palace, points toward the Temple under construction as if he were giving orders. In the foreground, workers perform various tasks and carry pieces of stone and wicker baskets or pails of mortar toward the Temple. At the top of the building, a hoist lifts material to the roof, where piles of cut stones await place-ment. Although scholars have never thought of this as an eyewitness description, this illumination has often been re-produced to illustrate how a late medieval building site must have looked. In several handbooks and studies, it is used to give an idea of the range of crafts involved in the construction process. one can easily recognize a sculptor carving a statue, stonecutters carving moldings on dressed stones, and masons and laborers mixing what appear to be lime, sand, and water to produce mortar. This depiction of an outdoor building yard showing lathomi, caementarii, and ymaginatores was in-cluded as a generic illustration in Nicola Coldstream’s hand-book on medieval construction history, Masons and Sculptors.1 If this image is considered more closely, however, several heretofore unnoticed details help establish a precise historic background for it, provide valuable information about the il-luminator’s architectural and technical knowledge, and offer insight into the meanings assigned to Gothic forms and build-ing expertise around the middle of the fifteenth century.

The dating and authorship of the miniature are central to its interpretation. In a recent study that mentions this illu-mination, François Avril acknowledges that the illuminator of the Antiquités is linked to Jean Fouquet, but he rejects an identification with Fouquet himself and instead proposes a new attribution.2 He discusses the manuscript’s complicated history and well-known ex libris that states, “Jehan Foucquet



182 Gesta v52n2, Fall 2013

Figure 1. Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, craftsmen building the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, 1470s ( from Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 4). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.



In the Masons’ Yard 183

natif de Tours,” and draws a pointed stylistic comparison with the work of the Master of the Munich Boccaccio. This com-parison leads Avril to identify the Antiquités illuminator with this latter artist, whom he proposes is one of Jean Fouquet’s sons, Louis or François.3 Accordingly, he suggests that the mention of Fouquet in the manuscript, very likely added after 1488, can be explained by François Robertet’s confusion of the illustrious father with his son. The attribution of the man-uscript to the son of Fouquet prompts Avril to propose a date of 1470–75, whereas Nicole Reynaud had previously sug-gested a date of about 1465.4 For the sake of this paper, how-ever, it is only necessary to keep in mind the date 1465–75 and the attribution to Jean Fouquet or a very close collaborator, whom I shall call the Master of the Munich Boccaccio.5

The dating and attribution are not immaterial, for it has long been noted that the facade of the Temple of Solomon is based on that of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours, which was under construction at this time.6 Apart from the general comparison, little attention has been paid to the use of the model and its meaning. Small but significant details raise im-portant questions regarding the architectural knowledge of the Master of the Munich Boccaccio and his familiarity with contemporary building techniques.

Late Medieval Architectural Procedures

Like many Gothic church facades, the west front of the putative Temple has three portals framed with jamb figures,

3. Ibid., 18–28.4. François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peinture

en France, 1440–1520 (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 140.5. The full name of the Munich Boccaccio manuscript (Munich,

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Gall. 6; formerly Gall. 369) is Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes; it was the second translation in French of Boccaccio’s Casibus virorum illustrium by Laurent de Premierfait. For the manuscript, see Marie-Hélène Tesnière, “La réception des ‘Cas des nobles hommes et femmes’ de Boccace en France au XVe siècle d’après l’illustration des manuscrits,” in Autori e lettori di Boccaccio: atti del Convegno internazionale di Certaldo, 20–22 settembre 2001, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Cesati, 2002), 287–402. For the artist, see Avril, Jean Fouquet, 269–374.

6. one of the earliest mentions of this comparision was made by Paul Durrieu, “Le Temple de Jérusalem dans l’art français et flamand du XVe siècle,” in Mélanges offerts à M. Gustave Schlum berger. . . . (Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Guethner, 1924), 2:509–11. See also Carol Herselle Krinsky, “Representations of the Temple of Jerusalem before 1500,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 1–19, esp. 11–12. For the facade of Tours Cathedral, see Thomas Rapin, “La cathédrale de Tours: la façade; les campagnes du XVe siècle et le programme iconographique du portail central,” Congrès archéologique de France 155 (1997): Touraine (Paris: Société Française d’Archéologie, 2003), 301–15.

figurative archivolts, and triangular gables (Fig. 1). Closer ex-amination yields more information. To create his structure, the painter copied only the central portal of Tours Cathedral and multiplied it three times. one can easily recognize spe-cific features of Saint-Gatien in the Temple’s facade (Fig. 2). In the upper parts of the portal one notes the finial atop the ogee, the small arches decorating its extrados, and the straight edge of the gable embellished with cabbage leaves. At Tours, as in the miniature, the traditional carved tympanum and lintel have disappeared and been replaced by stained glass. Despite the nineteenth-century alterations to the tympanum, the miniature and the actual building show the same design over the doors: the glazed tympanum and its two rectangular stained-glass windows surmounted by bracketed arches that are separated by a pinnacle.7 Also noteworthy are the niches and figures crowned with elongated foliate pinnacles on the buttresses between the portals (Fig. 3). Even more specifically, in the manuscript there is an empty canopied space beneath the pedestal supporting each figure on the jambs and in the lower part of the buttresses. The same disposition is found on the facade at Tours: these spaces, although entirely restored and left empty in the nineteenth century, were once filled with sculpted reliefs illustrating scenes from Genesis.8 An even more striking comparison can be found on the buttress in the lower right corner of the Temple illumination (Fig. 4). At the height of the adjacent gables, the upper part of this buttress precisely follows the design of the cathedral: two rows of thin columns and trilobed arches form angular pro-jections and delimit niches, on top of which are tiny blind arcades and another set of foliated pinnacles. This is not a passing reminiscence of the cathedral in Fouquet’s native city. The exact—one might even say perfect—quotation of the trac-ery of the buttress decoration at Tours raises questions that will be addressed later.

7. The Flamboyant tracery of the stained glass in the tympanum is the result of nineteenth-century restoration work; the same may be true of the crucifix above the trumeau. We know, for instance, that in 1829 the diocesan architect Gustave Guérin removed three fleurs-de-lis from this stained-glass tympanum and replaced them with roses (Archives nationales de France, F 19 7901; cited in Rapin, “La cathédrale de Tours,” 306). Before restoration, two figures very likely surmounted the finials on top of each door, as can be seen in Fig. 2, left. In 1842 Guérin planned a complete and questionable res-toration of the central portal’s sculptural decoration, including these last two figures (Archives nationales de France, F19 7900; cited in Rapin, “La cathédrale de Tours,” 309).

8. Although planned from the beginning of the construction, these reliefs were probably carved during the episcopate of Robert de Lenoncourt (1484–1509); see Jean Maan, Sancta et Metropolitana Ecclesiae Turonensis. . . . (Tours: Maan, 1667), 182-IV.




Elements copied from another contemporary building can also be detected in the Temple of Solomon. At each end of the west facade, two additional portals penetrate the flanks of the building. on fol. 163r of the Antiquités manuscript only the southern one is visible (Fig. 1), but on fol. 213v (Fig. 5), which depicts the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, we can infer the presence of a northern portal, symmetrical with the southern one, by the smoke rising from around the cor-ner. As I demonstrated in an earlier article, this peculiar ar-chi tectural layout is directly linked to that of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul at Nantes, 160 kilometers west of Tours. There, two portals, perpendicular to the rest of the west facade, penetrate the flanks of the towers and delimit a trans-versal space at the church’s western end (Fig. 6).9 This unique

9. Jean-Marie Guillouët, “Façade et circulations urbaines: enjeux architecturaux et figuratifs; le cas de Nantes,” in La porte et le pas-sage: porches et portails; actes du colloque d’Auxerre, 2–4 octobre 2008, Art Sacré 28, ed. Pierre-Gilles Girault (orléans: Rencontre avec le Patrimoine Religieux, 2010), 136–47.

disposition exists only at Nantes; there is no antecedent or other example of this unorthodox layout except in the fouque-tian illumination. For this reason, we must recognize Nantes Cathedral as the model here, rather than orsanmichele in Florence as Paul Durrieu suggested.10

It is in this context that the date of MS fr. 247 becomes important. We know that shortly after the mid-fifteenth cen-tury and for at least two decades, the building sites at Nantes and Tours were the two main centers of artistic production in the Loire valley and, more generally, in western France. In the wake of a decline in royal and princely building activ-ity after the death of Jean of Berry and during the ensuing English occupation, for several years these two building sites attracted craftsmen who included the most esteemed artists in the kingdom.

10. Durrieu, “Le Temple de Jérusalem,” 509–11, raises this hypoth-esis very cautiously. See also Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 405n2.

Figure 2. Left: Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, detail of central portal, 1470s ( from Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 4). Right: Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, detail of central portal (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 3. Left: Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, detail of buttress between portals, 1470s ( from Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 4). Right: Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, detail of buttress between portals (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




The facade of Tours Cathedral had been under reconstruc-tion since about 1431 in an effort to harmonize the Roman-esque west front with the Gothic nave, newly erected and roofed between 1429 and 1431. Thomas Rapin has recently shown that at midcentury only the central portal had been completed. The other entrances were finished two or three

decades later, by the master mason Jean Papin.11 Construction work on the facade at Nantes began just a few years later, in 1434, and proceeded briskly for three decades. It is very likely that most of the lower parts of that facade were erected before 1460 and the sculptural decoration was either already carved or well under way by then.12 A precise and convenient point of reference for this chronology can be found in an archival document dated 27 April 1464 that mentions the destruction of the Romanesque facade.13 The cathedral building sites at Tours and Nantes were not only simultaneous, at a time when opportunities for work were rare, but they were also geo-graphically close and connected by the Loire River. Many ma-sons and craftsmen worked on both buildings. This is the case for the second master mason at Nantes, Mathurin Rodier, well documented in the account books at Tours for the pe-riod 1431–33.14 His predecessor, Guillaume de Dammartin, is known only by name but was probably related to the con- tem porary master mason at Tours, Jean de Dammartin. Con-ti n uous exchange of workers is documented in the fourth de cade of the fifteenth century and helps to explain the simi-larities between the two monuments.15

The two monuments also shared a peculiar technical fea-ture directly linked to the miniature under consideration. The canopies in the archivolts of the portals at Tours and Nantes (Fig. 7) and the pedestals on the two facades (Fig. 8) are enhanced by an unusual technical device found at this time only in these two buildings and in isolated structures in and around Bourges.16 Behind the miniature arches and lan-

11. Rapin, “La cathédrale de Tours,” 307; and Thomas Rapin and Julien Noblet, “L’évolution de la façade de la cathédrale de Tours (XIIe–XVIe siècle),” Bulletin de la Société archéologique de Touraine 47 (2001): 67–77, esp. 71–72.

12. on the history of Nantes Cathedral, see Jean-Marie Guillouët, Les portails de la cathédrale de Nantes: un grand programme sculpté du XVe siècle et son public (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003).

13. Archives municipales de Nantes, GG 600, fol. 4; cited in Guillouët, “Façade et circulations urbaines,” 139.

14. Pierre Gasnault, “Comptes de la cathédrale de Tours, 1431–1433,” Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France 86 (1962): 96–99.

15. Several craftmen including Raoul François and Jean Moulin probably worked in both towns (Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique, 107 J 251 [Papiers Bourdeau], 5 May 1460 and 27 August 1457).

16. For instance, the baldachins of the niches adorning the north and south walls of the chapel in the Palais Jacques Coeur in Bourges (ca. 1444–51). See Jean-Yves Ribault, Le palais Jacques Coeur (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 2001). other examples of this disposition can be found in several later buildings, such as the cathedrals of Saintes (Charente-Maritime) and Bourges (Cher) and the abbey church of Saint-Riquier (Somme).

Figure 4. Left: Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, detail of south corner buttress, 1470s ( from Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 4). Right: Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, detail of south corner buttress (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




cets of the blind tracery, a thin slab of slate has been inserted. Th is artifi ce requires remarkable skill in stonecutting as well as perfect mastery of geometric design for preparing the trac-ery. At Tours it is fortunate that several of the canopies were taken down in the late nineteenth century and stored in the cloister known as the Cloître de la Psalette, next to the cathe-dral. Most of them preserve vestiges of this technical char-acteristic. When deteriorated, partially broken, or destroyed, they yield detailed information about the procedures used by the craft smen (Fig. 9). For instance, we can recognize the marks left by the diff erent tools—saws, axes, chisels—and also see how the stonecutters managed to slide or insert the thin sheet of slate behind the delicate surface arches.

one of the canopies in the lapidary storage area in the cloister is particularly interesting with regard to the fouque-tian miniature (Fig. 10). Standing today in the northwest corner of the cloister, this canopy is the best preserved and very likely comes from the central portal of the cathedral. By chance, its upper surface (lit d’attente) is intact and retains a preparatory drawing (Fig. 11). Th e incisions, which have

gone unnoticed until now, tell us much about late medieval building practices and shed light on the medieval craft sman’s knowledge of geometry.17 Although the stonecutter used a compass (two points are still visible at the center of the block of stone), he did not succeed in dividing his working space into three equilateral triangles (Fig. 12). Th e slight irregulari-ties in the angles suggest that a kind of square called a sau-terelle or équerre d’onglet was used in preparing the tracery layout.18 More important, the craft sman carved out three rect -angular cavities, clearly visible from the top, to receive the threesheets of slate. other baldachins in the cloister indicate that these rectangular cavities were carved with a stone chisel ap-prox imately 2.5 centimeters in width (note the receding left face in Fig. 9).

Th is technique of architectural decoration was used simul-taneously at Nantes and Tours in the lower parts of the portals and the baldachins of the archivolts about 1450, if not a de-c ade earlier. Historians of medieval architecture and sculp ture have paid little attention to this unusual decorative system. A rapid inventory shows that it may have developed from earlier

17. For an initial insight, see Lon R. Shelby, “Th e Geometrical Knowledge of Mediaeval Master Masons,” Speculum 47, no. 3 (1972): 395–421; and, most recently, Nancy Y. Wu, ed., Ad Quad-ratum: Th e Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Archi-tecture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and Amadeo Serra Desfilis, “Con ocimiento, traza e ingenio en la arquitectura valenciana del siglo XV,” Anales de historia del arte 22 (2012): 163–96. I am currently examining this decorative disposition in a broader study of the tech-nical history of architecture and sculpture in late medieval Europe.

18. I owe Th ierry Grégor of Saintes my warmest thanks for his indispensable help in reading these incisions.

Figure 6. “Plan de l’église cathédrale sous l’invocation de Saint-Pierre,” Nantes, Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul Cathedral, by Félix Seheult, 2 September 1835, detail (photo: from Jean-Marie Guillouët, Les portails de la cathédrale de Nantes: un grand programme sculpté du XVe siècle et son public [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003], 25).

Figure 5. Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 213v, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, 1470s (photo: from Erik Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation aft er the Hundred Years War [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 194). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




experiments, about 1400, in carving liturgical furniture in stone near Bourges.19 The technique seems to derive from fourteenth-century tomb sculpture and its architectural deco-ration, which plays on the color contrast of black and white marble or alabaster. The facades of Nantes and Tours are the first examples of its use in archivolt canopies, but for five or six decades thereafter we find it in monuments in central France, Normandy, Picardy, Aunis, and Saintonge. The development continues at Chambord, where the decorative use of slate and stone marks the definitive arrival of Renaissance bichromy.20

19. See the upper part of the liturgical basin in the chapel of the castle at Bois Sir Amé, about 1400 (rural district of Vorly, Cher). Jean-Pierre Adam, Nicolas Faucherre, and Armelle Querrien, “Les châteaux de Bois Sir Amé de la motte à la ‘folie’ du roi de Bourges,” Bulletin monumental 170–72 (2012): 99–138.

20. For an overview of polychromy in medieval architecture and the use of color, see Denis Verret and Delphine Steyaert, eds., La couleur et la pierre: polychromie des portails gothiques; actes du colloque, Amiens, 12–14 octobre 2000 (Amiens: Agence Régionale du Patrimoine de Picardie; Paris: Picard, 2002); Anne Vuillemard, “La polychromie de l’architecture gothique à travers l’exemple de l’Alsace” (PhD diss., Université de Strasbourg, 2003); Michel Pastoureau, “L’église et la couleur des origines à la Reforme,”

In the miniature of Les antiquités judaïques, one of the five workers in the foreground is using the technique just de-scribed. The craftsman to the left of the one stirring mortar is cutting a canopy (Fig. 13). The work is well advanced, as two of the miniature gables are visible on its faces. He is carving a rectangular slot to receive a sheet of slate. In his left hand he holds a punch or point, which he strikes with a stone hammer. This image also tells us about the order of steps necessary to execute the canopy: the layered surface carving of the pin-nacle and tracery precedes the coring of the cavity within the stone (like the one on the Tours canopy in Figs. 9–11) and the insertion of the sheet of slate. The sculptor portrayed in the miniature is performing the task of the actual sculptors working at the Tours or Nantes cathedrals. This exact obser-vation of a technical operation that could be witnessed only on the building sites at Nantes or Tours is entirely consistent

Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 147 (1989): 203–30; idem, “Morales de la couleur: le chromoclasme de la Réforme,” in La couleur: regards croisés sur la couleur du Moyen Âge au XXe siècle; actes du colloque, ed. Philippe Junod and Michel Pastoureau (Paris: Léopard d’or, 1994), 27–49; and idem, Bleu: histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 100–114.

Figure 7. Nantes, Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul Cathedral, St. Paul portal, southern archivolts, detail (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




with what was underscored earlier regarding quotations from the Tours Cathedral portals and buttresses in the fouquetian illumination.

Two later fifteenth-century manuscript images represent the construction of Solomon’s Temple by copying the Jose-phus construction scene of the Master of the Munich Boc-caccio (Fig. 1). Neither features the same technical detail of the slot being carved by the sculptor in the foreground, although the archetypal fouquetian illumination is quoted in most respects. In the Josephus preserved at Cologny (Fig. 14), from the end of the fifteenth century, the sculptor is depicted wearing the same clothing and assumes the same pose, but the image reveals a lack of comprehension of the exact na-ture of the task he is performing.21 Similarly, the illumination in Jean Mansel’s Fleur des histoires, from the third or fourth quarter of the fifteenth century, shows a sculptor carving a dressed stone but without the intricacies of the procedure used at Tours and Nantes.22 The later illuminators probably omitted this detail because they did not understand its pre-cise meaning.

21. Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques: Cologny [Geneva], Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cod. Bodmer 181, fol. 161r; www.e-codices .unifr.ch/en/cb/0181/161r/medium.

22. Jean Mansel, Fleur des histoires: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 55, fol. 70v.

The stonecutter in MS fr. 247 (Fig. 13) is singular and infor-mative from several points of view. First of all, the baldachin in the cloister at Tours has three distinct carved slots, one for each face. In the miniature, the block being carved has three or even four faces, but only one slot is being cut. The illumi-nator draws attention to the particularity of the technique by a slight simplification that renders the procedure he just wit-nessed more legible. Second, the clothing of the stonecutter sets him apart from his colleagues. He is wearing a long, fit-ted jacket with a row of buttons and a toque with a turned- up brim. His garb is far more elegant, more bourgeois, than the cinched tunics, sweatbands, and straw hats of the other men. Illuminators were often attentive to details of personal dress and professional costume as indicators of class and trade, and here these details apparently express the higher status of the sculptor—as an artist—in comparison to lesser-paid masons or unskilled laborers. In several documents the elevated posi-tion of certain stonecutters is apparent from the higher wages they received. Such differentiations among the craftsmen can be discerned, for example, at Saint-Maclou in Rouen or in accounts for the portal of St. Guillaume at Bourges Cathe-dral;23 they reflect a practical and informal hierarchy within the masons’ lodge. As far as we know, the late medieval socio-

23. Étienne Hamon, “Un grand chantier de l’époque flamboyante: la reconstruction de la tour Nord de la cathédrale de Bourges (1507–1537)” (PhD diss., École Nationale des Chartes, 1999).

Figure 8. Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, pedestal of central portal with inserted slate slabs (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




professional and corporate organization included only the ranks of master, apprentice, and servant.24 The illuminator emphasized a practical or informal hierarchy, based on talent and specialization, by distinguishing the stonecutter by his clothing, gesture, frontality, height, and axiality with regard to the angle of the Temple. He is given far more emphasis than the master on the left, who is carving a statue.25

As we now know, the Antiquités illuminator was not illus-trating a generic scene in a late medieval building site. The details I have signaled clearly show that the Master of the

24. Linda Elaine Neagley maintains that several of Saint-Maclou’s masons were granted the status and title of appareilleur; Linda Elaine Neagley, Disciplined Exuberance: The Parish Church of Saint-Maclou and Late Gothic Architecture in Rouen (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 12ff., but the documen-tation she refers to does not allow for such a conclusion, as Étienne Hamon has pointed out (review in Bulletin monumental 158, no. 2 [2000]: 169–70).

25. on the role of technical virtuosity and the status of virtuoso craftsmen, one should mention the well-known sociological work of Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See also, more recently, “Virtuosités ou Les sublimes aventures de la technique,” ed. Victor A. Stoichita, Emmanuel Grimaud, and Graham Jones, special issue, Ateliers d’anthropologie 35 (2011), ateliers.revues.org/8838.

Munich Boccaccio meant to recall quite explicitly the two great building enterprises of his time, Nantes and Tours. This illumination reveals how well informed he was about archi-tectural practices and technical procedures. His concern with the habitual gestures and actions of the craftsmen at the build-ing site is indicative of a whole realm in his artistic thought. In her superb monograph on the Hours of Étienne Chevalier, Nicole Reynaud underlines Jean Fouquet’s fascination with “gestures of the trade.”26 She points out how, in the scene of the martyrdom of St. James, the executioner—who has untied his shoelaces and put on a protective apron much like that of a butcher—evaluates the balance of the sword, his distance, and the momentum he needs to accomplish his task.27 The il -lumination in Les antiquités judaïques raises other questions regarding the nature of the artist’s knowledge and its meaning.

As a royal residence, fifteenth-century Tours attracted a fair number of artists, masons, and craftsmen along with a growing population that seems to have expanded mostly be-tween 1470 and 1490/1500.28 The fifteenth-century city was enclosed within the fourteenth-century ramparts, which were exceeded in only a few places. At the southeastern border of the city, the Gothic cathedral skirted the late antique defen-sive structure and expanded toward the west. The cathedral lay in the area that was once the antique city, called the Cité, and the district of the Arcis next to the Hôtel Dieu, which was close to the castle. The Fouquet family owned a house near the abbey of Saint-Martin in the district of Châteauneuf, only four or five hundred meters west of the cathedral.29

26. Much like the northern Italian artists Giovannino de’ Grassi and Pisanello, who recorded prosaic actions in their sketchbooks.

27. Nicole Reynaud, Jean Fouquet: les Heures d’Etienne Chevalier (Dijon: Faton, 2006), 172–73.

28. Thanks to the important studies of Bernard Chevalier, we now know late medieval Tours quite well: see, in particular, Bernard Chevalier, Tours: ville royale (1365–1520); origine et développe- ment d’une capitale à la fin du Moyen Âge, rev. ed. (Louvain: Vander, 1983). See also the exhibition catalogue by Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, Pascale Charron, Pierre-Gilles Girault, and Jean-Marie Guillouët, eds., Tours 1500: capitale des arts (Paris: Somogy, 2012), 111–14, map on 113.

29. Chevalier, Tours: ville royale, 71–76. François Avril and, more recently, Erik Inglis pointed out that Fouquet owned a house near the abbey of Saint-Martin, which appears in his Grandes chroniques. Source published in Avril, Jean Fouquet, 420; see also Erik Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 99. I leave aside the knotty question of the existence of an effective workshop supervised by Jean Fouquet himself (see Stephen Clancy, “Artisti in bottega, artisti senza bottega: il caso di Jean Fouquet,” in La bottega dell’artista: tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Roberto Cassanelli [Milan: Jaca Book, 1998], 109–30; quoted in Avril, Jean

Figure 9. Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, cloister, western colonnade, former canopy from central portal with inserted slate slabs (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




Construction sites such as that at Tours were public events in late medieval cities. Local labor was often employed for un-skilled jobs and for keeping the site free of gawkers, prowlers, and thieves.30 The illuminator may well have been familiar with the craftsmen and spent some time with them. But accu-rate knowledge of the technical procedures used in the con-struction process, such as those we have illustrated, involved more than chance encounters. It is probable that the Master of the Munich Boccaccio frequented the masons’ workshop itself and that he knew some of the sculptors personally as fellow artists; he must have observed their gestures and meth-ods, especially when executing such a striking and unusual dec - orative embellishment as the slate inserts. In his miniature he took care to cite verbatim the architectural design, tracery, and arches on the cathedral buttresses (Fig. 4). He may even have

Fouquet, 18). I am concerned only with where Jean Fouquet and perhaps his sons painted manuscripts and panels in Tours.

30. Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors, 6.

had access to the tracery room, where the wooden patterns for the main outlines of tracery were kept. In any case, it is evi- dent that the artist was much more than a casual observer of Gothic sculptural techniques.

The specificity of the Josephus miniature becomes all the more striking when it is compared with what is perhaps the most famous fifteenth-century image of a construction site. Jan van Eyck’s drawing of St. Barbara (silverpoint on paper, 1437, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) depicts the martyr seated on an elevated promontory in the foreground, while in the distance the tower of her impris-onment is being built.31 The silverpoint medium allows for detailed precision, but what interested van Eyck more is the grinding labor of mixing mortar, transporting, hoisting, and roughing out the stone. on the right are some finished, carved blocks, but the actions of the only sculptor who can be seen are indecipherable.

31. on the drawing of St. Barbara, see Rachel Billinge, Hélène Verougstraete, and Roger Van Schoute, “The Saint Barbara,” in Investigating Jan van Eyck, ed. Susan Foister, Sue Jones, and Del-phine Cool (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 41–48; and Carol J. Purtle, “Intention and Invention in Jan van Eyck’s Saint Barbara,” in Invention: Northern Renaissance Studies in Honor of Molly Faries, ed. Julien Chapuis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 50–63.

Figure 10. Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, cloister, northwest corner, former canopy from central portal with inserted slate slabs (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.

Figure 11. Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, cloister, northwest corner, former canopy from central portal, upper surface with preparatory tracery (photo: author). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




Artisanal versatility of master craftsmen, their collabo-ration, mutual interest, and comity are natural, and several significant examples are known from the late Middle Ages. Prominent artists such as André Beauneveu excelled in both sculpture and manuscript painting.32 There are several fa-mous examples of painters working closely with sculptors: Jean Malouel with Claus Sluter on the Well of Moses in 1403,33 and François Colombe with his illustrious uncle Michel on the tomb of Philibert II (“the Handsome”), duke of Savoy, in Brou, about 1511.34 Jean Fouquet himself was fascinated with contemporary architecture and sculpture. His depiction of the

32. See Susie Nash, with Till-Holger Borchert and Jim Harris, André Beauneveu: “No Equal in Any Land”; Artist to the Courts of France and Flanders (London: Paul Holberton in association with Musea Brugge/Groeningemuseum, 2007).

33. Susie Nash, “Claus Sluter’s ‘Well of Moses’ for the Chartreuse de Champmol Reconsidered,” Burlington Magazine 147 (2005): 798–809; 148 (2006): 456–67; 150 (2008): 724–41.

34. Claude Cochin, “Michel Colombe et ses projets pour l’église de Brou,” Revue de l’art ancien et moderne 35 (1914): 111–16. See also Chancel-Bardelot et al., Tours 1500, 190–91.

Annunciation in the Chevalier Hours portrays the duke of Berry’s Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges, with its sculpted apostles by Beauneveu.35 Fouquet’s portrait of Bertrand du Guesclin in his illustrated Grandes chroniques de France of 1455–60 is probably based on the sculpted likeness on Bertrand’s tomb at Saint-Denis.36 Moreover, Fouquet was summoned to work on the effigy of Charles VII for the king’s funeral service in 1461,37 and when Michel Colombe was commissioned to de-sign the tomb of Louis XI, he probably used that drawing for his model, although the project was never finished.38 Fouquet probably met the sculptor known as Filarete (Antonio di

35. Nicole Reynaud ( Jean Fouquet: les Heures d’Etienne Chevalier, 59) is cautious about this identification. See also Inglis, “Nation-Building: The Most Excellent Buildings of France,” in Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France, 141–204.

36. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 6465, fol. 434v; see François Avril, Marie-Thérèse Gousset, and Bernard Guenée, Les grandes chroniques de France: réproduction intégrale en fac-similé des miniatures de Fouquet (Paris: Lebaud, 1987), 224–25.

37. Avril, Jean Fouquet, 418.38. Ibid., 420; and Chancel-Bardelot et al., Tours 1500, 188.

Figure 12. Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, cloister, northwest corner, former canopy from central portal, upper surface with shallow rect-angular cavities for insertion of slate slabs (photo: Guy du Chazaud; preparatory tracery enhanced by author).

Figure 13. Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, detail of mason carving a canopy with cavities for insertion of slate slabs, 1470s (photo: from Guy Annequin, Jean Fouquet, prince des enlumineurs [Paris: Éditions de Crémille, 1989], 111).




Pietro Averlino) in Rome in the 1440s.39 The familiarity of the Master of the Munich Boccaccio with sculptors and masons undoubtedly stems directly from an attitude common in Fouquet’s workshop.

Gothic Syntax

Henri Zerner begins Renaissance Art in France: The Inven-tion of Classicism by discussing the specific status of French art flamboyant and its part in the development and spread of Renaissance ideas in France.40 He underlines the consider-able stylistic gap between the “very abstract art” of thirteenth-century painters like the illuminators of the Psalter of St. Louis and the “naturalistic art” of the Moulins Master or Jean Bour - dichon around 1500. Although Zerner acknowledges the nu-

39. Source published in Avril, Jean Fouquet, 420–21.40. Henri Zerner, Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of

Classicism (Paris: Flammarion, 2003); originally published as L’art de la Renaissance en France: l’invention du classicisme (Paris: Flam-marion, 1996).

merous and well-established arguments regarding the useful - ness of the notion and term Gothic, he refuses to use this term for fifteenth-century painting.41 Nevertheless, far more inter - esting and even more controversial is the next step in Zer-ner’s argument. While denying the relevance of the term for painting, he notes that “when one turns to architec ture, the situation is ambiguous.” For him, the so-called Gothic ar-chitecture “based on the principle of the ribbed vault and the pointed arch,” and especially Flamboyant ornamenta- tion, was the bearer of particular meaning and acquired a “specifically religious value.”42 Such symbolic value can be perceived, he says, in the famous double-page image from the Hours of Étienne Chevalier,43 in which Jean Fouquet es-tablished an ob vious contrast between the two architectural backdrops depicted in the scene (Fig. 15).

The Virgin and Child are seated in front of a Gothic church, which Zerner presents as “a type of Gothic that recalls the great buildings of the past rather than the Flamboyant fashion of the time.” It is the heavenly world that seems to be evoked by this “already old or ‘classic’ Gothic,” as opposed to the up-to-date setting on the left side with its rectilinear Corinthian pilasters. Indeed, one could think of this illumination as an expression of an opposition between secular magnificence, in the midst of which kneels the painting’s commissioner, and the eternal, heavenly world represented by “classic” Gothic architecture. In that sense, the symbolic value assigned to Gothic architecture ought to be directly related to its chrono-logical meaning, its venerable antiquity.44 A similar dialec- tical confrontation was pointed out by Paul Crossley, who discussed the well-known quotation by Raphael concerning the Germanic origins of Gothic architecture. According to Raphael, the Germans drew inspiration “from trees, not yet cut down, whose branches were bent over and made to form pointed arches when tied together.”45 Crossley suggested that

41. See also Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Inter-pretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 641–50.

42. Zerner, Renaissance Art in France, 25.43. All but seven of the miniatures are housed and displayed

at the Musée Condé in Chantilly. See Reynaud, Jean Fouquet: les Heures d’Étienne Chevalier; Avril, Jean Fouquet, 193–206; and Patricia D. Stirnemann, with Marie-Thérèse Gousset, Claudia Rabel, and Emmanuelle Toulet, Les Heures d’Étienne Chevalier par Jean Fouquet: les quarante enluminures du Musée Condé (Paris: Somogy; Chantilly: Musée Condé, 2003).

44. See Nagel and Wood, “Non-Actual Histories of Architecture,” in Anachronic Renaissance, 147–58.

45. In Raphael’s famous report on the antiquities of ancient Rome, written by the artist for Pope Leo X. See Paul Crossley, “The Return to the Forest: Natural Architecture and the German Past in the Age of Dürer,” in Künstlerischer Austausch = Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte,

Figure 14. Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Cologny (Geneva), Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cod. Bodmer 181, fol. 161r, building the Temple in Jerusalem, late fifteenth century (photo: Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny [Geneva]). See the electronic edi-tion of Gesta for a color version of this image.




Raphael’s remark not only reflects the humanist’s disdain but also repeats an actual German belief about the true origin of their Gothic style, dating from time immemorial.

But the Gothic architecture in the Chevalier Hours has a far more precise meaning. The Virgin is seated in a semicir-cular Renaissance aedicule lined with a revetment of blue-veined marble panels and crowned with a conch shell. The aedicule fills the space normally occupied by the doorway of the Gothic portal. Yet the rest of this Gothic portal is easily identifiable and should no longer be regarded as an old- fashioned architectural setting. A comparison with the illumi - nation in Les antiquités judaïques shows that the portal is closely related to the central portal of Tours Cathedral (Fig. 16): it has the same number of archivolts, the same gable deco-rated with cabbage-leaf foliage, and the same small arches deco rating the extrados of the exterior archivolt. There are, however, several differences between the Hours of Étienne

Berlin 15.–20. Juli 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Aka-demie, 1992), 2:71–80.

Chevalier and the actual building, notably the form of the but tresses. The figural sculptures are an invention of Fou- quet because the central portal at Tours was not fully in place with its sculptural decoration before 1465–75, whereas the manuscript was painted between 1452 and 1460.46

Rather than confronting a modern architectural culture with an an cient and venerable style, the illuminator is display-ing two con temporary “modernities.” The recurrent opposition of “mod ernism” and “historicism” in the literature on Gothic architecture was addressed by Marvin Trachtenberg with re-gard to Suger’s Saint-Denis and the cathedral of Bourges.47 It has been raised again by Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, who, in the catalogue of the exhibition France 1500, reminds us that the understanding of the oppositional pair antique/modern is a

46. Avril, Jean Fouquet, 198–200; and Reynaud, Jean Fouquet: les Heures d’Étienne Chevalier.

47. Marvin Trachtenberg, “Suger’s Miracles, Branner’s Bourges: Reflections on ‘Gothic Architecture’ as Medieval Modernism,” Gesta 34, no. 2 (2000): 183–205.

Figure 15. Jean Fouquet, Hours of Étienne Chevalier, Chantilly, Musée Condée, unnumbered folio, Étienne Chevalier being presented to the Virgin, 1450s (photo: from Erik Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 46–47). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




delicate matter, because the contemporary use of this or that term around 1500 is the sign of a stylistic consciousness ra-ther than a weighted chronological allusion.48

other fouquetian illuminations contain scenes of build-ing sites, but none of them gives us such specific detail as does the Josephus miniature. In the image of Charlemagne

48. Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, “Le paysage artistique vers 1500: les mots et les choses,” in France 1500: entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Thierry Crépin-Leblond, and Elisabeth Taburet (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2010), 31–37. See also the seminal book by Ethan Matt Kavaler, Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); and the foreword in Le gothique de la Renaissance: actes des quatrième Rencontres d’architecture européenne, Paris, 12–16 juin 2007, ed. Monique Chatenet et al. (Paris: Picard, 2011).

building churches in his version of Les grandes chroniques, Jean Fouquet depicts a very generic building site (Fig. 17). The more or less classical architectural vocabulary of the building is directly linked to the text, which, as Erik Inglis pointed out, mentions the use of spolia from Rome and Ra-venna by Charlemagne, whose political goal was to revive an-cient Rome through the Renovatio imperii Romanorum. Les grandes chroniques even states his desire to see Rome “come ele avoit esté ancienement” (as it had been formerly).49 Yet the craftsmen at work on this monument are engaged in tasks of carving, carrying, and placing stones. The rectangular shape

49. Jules Viard, ed., Les grandes chroniques de France (Paris: Société de Histoire de France, 1922–23), 3:159; cited in Erik Inglis, “Jean Fouquet as a Painter of National History” (PhD diss., New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1998), 123.

Figure 16. Left: Flavius Josephus, Les antiquités judaïques, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 247, fol. 163r, by the Master of the Munich Boccaccio, detail of central portral, 1470s (photo: from Nicola Coldstream, Masons and Sculptors [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 4). Center: Tours, Saint-Gatien Cathedral, detail of central portal (photo: author). Right: Jean Fouquet, Hours of Étienne Chevalier, Chantilly, Musée Condée, unnumbered folio, Virgin and Child before a Gothic background (photo: from Erik Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 47). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




of the various dressed stones is consistent with the general requirements of the Roman style of the building and its round or segmental arch, but nothing more. The illuminator obvi-ously knows how a building site is managed, but its intricacies are of no further interest to him. The same is true of other building sites painted by Jean Fouquet and the Master of the Munich Boccaccio. In the Versailles Livy manuscript (Fig. 18), Livy—or his translator, Pierre Bersuire—is sitting in his scrip-torium on the left; the right side depicts the building of Rome, where two stonemasons use tools (a straight chisel and ham-mer on the left and a sort of trimming hammer on the right) to manufacture plain, rectangular, dressed stones.50

These last two comparisons underscore the exceptional nature of the portrayal of the construction site of Solomon’s Temple in Les antiquités judaïques. The accuracy of this pic-ture, precisely depicting the craftsmen’s work, the architec-tural design, and technical prowess, helps us to appreciate more fully the architectural knowledge of a very gifted late medieval illuminator in France. It also shows how medieval

50. Avril, Jean Fouquet, 336–38.

building yards like that of Tours were important crossroads for the circulation and transmission of forms and expertise, even between different fields of artistic endeavor.

The singularity of this miniature within the production of Fouquet and his sons also gives it special political impor-tance. The remarkable assembly of technical, architectural, and formal observations of Saint-Gatien at Tours strength-ens the link established between the cathedral of Tours and the Temple in Jerusalem. Such a comparison was explicitly in the mind of contemporary witnesses. We can mention here, for instance, a similar parallel in a journal of a pilgrim to Je-rusalem who cited Tours Cathedral and compared it with the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which he saw in 1461.51 This comparision is far from andecdotal. The pilgrim

51. “Hec ecclesia eminentissima fuit, et magni sumptus, in modum ecclesie sancti Gaciani Turonensis fuit constructa excepta navi que non havet voltam lapideam sed ligneam. omnes parietes hujus ecclesie depicte sunt dignissima et ditissima pictura, more ecclesie Venetorum, ad dextris et sinistris.” “Journal de voyage à Jérusalem de Louis de Rochechouart évêque de Saintes (1461),” ed. Camille Couderc, Revue de l’Orient latin 1 (1893): 168–274, at 259. It

Figure 17. Jean Fouquet, Les grandes chroniques de France, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 6465, fol. 96r, construction scene, 1455–60 (photo: from Guy Annequin, Jean Fouquet, prince des enlumineurs [Paris: Éditions de Crémille, 1989], 91). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.




appears to have been Louis de Rochechouart, bishop of Saintes from 1461 to 1493, and it is worth noting here that thecathedral of Saint-Pierre at Saintes is one of the very few othermonuments in which we fi nd the identical technical proce-dure of slates inserted behind the tracery of blind arcades in late medieval France.52

By means of this link between Saint-Gatien and Solomon’s Temple, it is implicitly the king of France—and, more specif-ically, the king reigning at the beginning of the construction of Tours Cathedral, Charles VII—who is placed in a relation-ship of equivalence or succession to Solomon himself. It was Jacques d’Armagnac, duke of Nemours, who entrusted the Master of the Munich Boccaccio with the task of fi nishing the miniatures in the manuscript of the Antiquités that had originally belonged to Jean, duke of Berry. Th e celebration ofthe cathedral work site and of Charles VII through an equa-tion of the Temple with Saint-Gatien (an equivalence that was

is my pleasure to thank Erik Inglis for drawing my attention to this captivating text.

52. In a forthcoming study I address all the occurrences of this decorative procedure and its cultural meanings and consequences, including the role of the technique in the individuation process as it has been thoroughly and brilliantly studied by Gilbert Simondon, L’invention dans les techniques: cours et conférences (Paris: Seuil, 2005); idem, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958); and idem, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique: l’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964).

probably as dear to the painter as to his patron) is certainly not unrelated to the duke of Nemour’s diffi culties during the reign of Louis XI, aft er his participation in the Ligue du bienpublic, which led to his arrest at Carlat in 1476. As Inglis already pointed out in connection with the two Josephus images (Figs. 1 and 5), the confl ation with recognizablebuildings in these miniatures “reveals architecture’s signalimportance, for in it the artist departs from the text,” which “enabled the French to see themselves mirrored both in He-brew history and in their own architecture.”53 By the late fi f-teenth century, due in part to the technology of architectural draft ing, such confl ations may reveal a new rela tion between representations of architecture and actual built architecture, as James Bugslag has recently demonstrated. It is notewor-thy that this new conjunction took place meaningfully when “church buildings began to be analysed exegetically.”54

Behind the artist’s observation of simple technical details that appear practical, even banal, lies a network of much deeper meaning to which the modern art historian must pay attention if he or she wishes to gain full access to the work of the intimate circle of one of the greatest French painters at the end of the Middle Ages.

53. Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France, 192.54. James Bugslag uses the Josephus illumination in his analy-

sis: James Bugslag, “Architectural Draft ing and the ‘Gothicization’ of the Gothic Cathedral,” in Reading Gothic Architecture, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 1, ed. Matthew M. Reeve (Turn hout: Brepols, 2008), 57–74, esp. 72–73.

Figure 18. Master of the Munich Boccaccio, Versailles Livy, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 273–74, fol. 7r, Livy in his study records the building of Rome (photo: from François Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle [Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Hazan, 2003], 336). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.



in the masons’ yard: insights from french gothic manuscript painting

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