Art - Richard Cork is transported into the miniature worlds of Renaissance manuscripts
Now that so much contemporary art is space-hungry, demanding colossal rooms for ever more elaborate installations, the hand-painted books assembled at the Royal Academy seem even more astonishing. Here, the images are so small that you really need a magnifying glass to appreciate them properly. Most Flemish manuscript illumination from the Renaissance period was meant to be studied at very close quarters. And infatuated owners often lavished enormous amounts of time on these exquisite images.
Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold, looks completely rapt as she holds her book of devotions. One picture painted within the text seems to transport her to a more spiritual realm. The window beyond shows her kneeling in a graceful gothic cathedral, overcome to find her- self praying before the Virgin and child accompanied by four solemn angels.
This miniature, a tour de force by the Vienna Master of Mary of Burgundy, conveys the wonder felt by patrons who commissioned such sumptuous volumes. Their modest dimensions only increased the paintings' ability to captivate. And we in turn are amazed to discover how skilful these artists could be, producing work just as impressive as many far larger paintings installed as altarpieces in the grandest religious buildings.
The Hours of Mary of Burgundy were probably executed in the early 1470s, near the beginning of the period surveyed by the Royal Academy's unmissable show "Illuminating the Renaissance". Charles the Bold had just succeeded his father, Philip the Good, as Duke of Burgundy. And over the next century, artists in Renaissance Flanders brought the great tradition of book-painting to new levels of accomplishment and invention. They were inspired above all by the formidable achievements of their predecessors. Rogier van der Weyden, who died in 1464, had been renowned as a consummate master of oil-painting on panel. But he was also adept at painting in tempera on parchment, the very different technique required for manuscript illumination.
The RA show is prefaced by an extraordinary rarity: van der Weyden's frontispiece for the Chroniques de Hainaut, a history of the province conquered by Philip some years earlier. The duke, elegantly arrayed in fashionable black damask, dominates the miniature. Young Charles the Bold stands beside him, resplendent in a sumptuous golden doublet. Surrounded by haughty courtiers, both duke and heir gaze down with imperious fascination at the kneeling Jean Wauquelin, who offers to Philip his weighty translation of the Chroniques.
The entire scene, realised with a sophisticated grasp of stately ritual, demonstrates the immense importance that the Burgundians attached to illuminated books. They were enormously proud of their prowess as book producers. Monarchs, rulers and aristocrats throughout Europe vied with each other to acquire prayer books and secular texts illustrated by the finest artists in Flanders. Simon Marmion was among the most highly prized painters. Margaret of York, who became Charles the Bold's third wife, cherished one of Marmion's outstanding cycles of illuminations for Les Visions du Chevalier Tondal, a masterpiece of infernal literature written by a medieval monk.
Marmion is at his most arresting in The Beast Acheron: devourer of the avaricious. Infra-red reflectography has recently disclosed that he started out painting a mountain next to Acheron, whose titanic mouth gapes open to reveal tormented figures burning within. But Marmion finally decided to obliterate the mountain with blackness, thereby focusing our attention on Acheron's fiery furnace. Two attenuated victims stand out from the inferno. Silhouetted against the flames, they appear to be impaled on the beast's sharp, curving teeth. The naked Tondal, who is shown this nightmarish vision by a coolly composed angel, clasps both hands in prayer while his knees buckle with terror.
Marmion's subsequent attempts to paint The Joy of the Faithfully Married, or The Glory of Good Monks and Nuns, seem disappointingly pious and tepid when set against this hellish horror. Their placidity looks merely complacent after the trauma of Acheron's consuming fire.
Similar moments of nightmare erupt elsewhere in the show. A superb edition of Jean Froissart's celebrated Chroniques contains a macabre painting of Charles II of Navarre being burned to death in his bed. Although it was supposedly an accident, the anonymous artist known as the Master of the Getty Froissart clearly thought otherwise. He shows a ruthless figure blowing flames through a tube at the bottom of the bed. Charles, with pillows and sheets blazing around him, clasps his hands helplessly and opens his mouth to yell. But the three finely attired courtiers nearby appear oddly unconcerned. They converse among themselves, as if nothing were happening. And the two dogs remain equally impervious.
Bedrooms, however, are not always scenes of disaster. Among the most delightful illuminations is The Creation of the Human Soul, painted in a treatise written by St Bonaventure. The artist, known only as the Master of Edward IV, shows a husband and wife lying together in their well-upholstered bed. The woman, her eyelids lowered, smiles, seemingly on the verge of sleep. But her companion looks up in astonishment - a naked baby has just flown across the room with a speed that makes a candle's flame bend and waver in the slipstream. Hovering now above the couple's discarded slippers, the infant stretches out both arms in the direction of the mother-to-be. Viewed in this beatific light, her smile assumes an expression of supreme contentment.
The most prophetic aspect of Flemish manuscript painting lies in its pioneering response to landscape. Wherever we look in these painted books, artists are defining nature with a new-found subtlety and zeal. Simon Bening is the most innovative, producing around 1550 a calendar cycle of the seasons brimming with the urge for renewal. His figures and animals are unambitious, but Bening makes them subservient to the sweep of the landscapes beyond. His little painting of June can even be seen as a potent precedent for Pieter Bruegel the Elder's revolutionary landscapes of the 1560s. By placing Bening's calendar images next to Bruegel's sublime late oil painting Landscape with a Magpie on the Gallows, the RA survey clinches their kinship. The magpie, which Bruegel regarded as a pernicious gossip, looks down from its ghoulish perch on peasants dancing rowdily nearby. But the bird's lofty vantage also leads our eyes far into the distance, where Bruegel takes us on a vertiginous airborne journey over a broad river valley capped by rugged outcrops. His vision seems limitless, all-encompassing and alive with light. That it was inspired by the tiny, hair's-breadth art of manuscript illumination makes the sweep of his achievement all the more miraculous.
"Illuminating the Renaissance" continues at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London W1 (020 7300 8000 or 7300 5760) until 22 February
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