This study is the first to systematically examine the production of illuminated manuscripts in Tournai from 1380 to 1430, a period in which the city played a key role in the history of western painting. It was during these crucial years that the Tournai painter Robert Campin revolutionised courtly painting and established, along with Jan van Eyck, the foundations of the northern Renaissance.
Whilst the panel paintings associated with Campin have been the subject of numerous studies, manuscript illumination, by contrast, has remained the poor relation in historiographic terms. Clearly, the impassioned debate surrounding the personality of Robert Campin, alias ‘the Master of Flémalle’, has largely eclipsed this entire aspect of the history of Tournaisian art. However, it is apparent from archival sources that illuminators were active in Tournai during the fifteenth century and that their craft was subordinated to that of the painters. Moreover, a recently discovered document has shown that Campin himself made or had miniatures made. However, despite these proven links, no systematic study has yet examined manuscript production at the time of the Tournaisian master, even though, through ‘stealthy approaches on the side’, it might potentially shed light on his still controversial oeuvre.
The present study seeks to redress this neglect. An important group of about thirty manuscripts, mostly little known, has been assembled around a missal documented as having been illuminated by the Tournaisian Jean Semont (died c.1414) for presentation to the abbey of Saint-Amand by a priest originally from Tournai. The group is not just limited to the usual liturgical books and devotional works: it also includes didactic, philosophical, theological and ascetic treatises as well as administrative documents and several vernacular romances. Together they present a broad panorama of manuscript production in Tournai, which was then a French city, enchased between the counties of Flanders and Hainaut, and which consequently might have served as the pivot between the two main centres of production, Paris and Flanders. In this respect, Jean Semont’s style is clearly derived from Parisian art, of which it constitutes a regional variant, but one that was not indifferent to the attainments of so-called ‘pre-Eyckian’ miniature painting.
It would be mistaken to consider Jean Semont as an artisan confined to the local sphere, the epitome of Tournai illumination of c.1400. His renown extended well beyond the city walls into northern France. Within Tournai itself, he was by no means the only illuminator active there. Several anonymous artists were working around him, both followers and distinct artistic personalities. Their miniatures feature common compositions and a decorative repertory, outlining the contours of a local production, itself anchored within a broader tradition. To cite just one example, the study of the Semont group opens up new perspectives on the much-disputed question of the origin of the Master of Guillebert de Mets’s oeuvre. It demonstrates how styles and ideas migrated up and down the Scheldt, the river linking Tournai with Audenarde and Ghent.
Aside from its interest for the history of art in general, this ensemble of manuscripts is indicative of the intellectual and artistic effervescence that was prevalent in Tournai at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and of the city’s regional influence at this time. A whole network of sociability can be outlined, with important conduits like Pierre de Hauteville, the Prince of Love – the central figure of Charles VI’s Court of Love, whose members included more than sixty Tournaisians: the ‘Burgundian’ bishops of Tournai and members of the cathedral chapter, representatives of the nobility – Robert de Wavrin, Jean de Werchin, Robert de Mortagne, Gilles de Chin, Hue de Lannoy, as well as the local upper bourgeoisie – the Braque, Quinghien, Dere, etc. Amongst the commissioners of illuminated manuscripts were also prelates and members of the regional clergy, attached to institutions as important as the abbeys of Saint-Amand and Marchiennes or the chapter of Saint-Pierre in Lille.
From all the evidence, it seems that the artistic milieu of Tournai thrived until around 1430. At the same time as the illuminators, sculptors and literary societies were prospering, panel painting around Robert Campin enjoyed unprecedented success. Inevitably this poses the thorny question of the connections between the celebrated painter and the art of illumination, a problem often evoked in passing in monographs devoted to him. This study brings new material to the discussion. In terms of iconography, the points of contact between paintings associated with Campin and contemporary Tournaisian illumination remain rather tenuous, even if they undeniably exist. They show the existence of compositions that were particularly favoured in Tournai across all artistic media. Far more important though is the discovery of three illuminated leaves detached from a sumptuous prayerbook, now divided between Princeton and Enschede. In our opinion, these exceptional miniatures can be attributed to the Campin milieu. The modest marginal decoration is undeniably Tournaisian, whilst the superb historiated scenes could be the work of an illuminator from Campin’s entourage.
Far from being limited to Tournai, this study opens up a new chapter in the history of manuscript illumination and covers one of the most remarkable periods in the art of the southern Low Countries, that of the genesis of the ars nova. In doing so, it revisits some of its most fascinating problems.