The defeat of Antiochus, King of Syria, at the battle of Magnesia, cut from the Romuléon, an illuminated manuscript on vellum

£14,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A fine secular miniature once illustrating what would have been an imposing copy of the Romuléon , already separated by 1884 (see below). The work draws on several classical and Christian authors and tells the story of Rome and the Romans from the time of Romulus and Remus to Constantine the Great. The original compilation, in Latin, was made by Benvenuto da Imola between 1361 and 1364, but in the 1460s, in response to the courtly taste for histories and chronicles in the vernacular, two writers independently undertook to translate the work into French (see S. McKendrick, ‘The Romuléon and the MSS of Edward IV’, Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium , 1994, pp.149-69). The present miniature illustrated a chapter of the translation of Jean Miélot, resident of Lille between 1453 and 1472, who was in the service of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, from around 1448 until the duke’s death in 1467. Only six complete manuscripts of Miélot’s translation survive, all of them luxury volumes made in the southern Netherlands for members or friends of the Burgundian court. They were attributed to an illuminator active in Langres between 1480 and 1493 serving clients in Champagne and Lorraine (N. Reynaud in Les Manuscrits à peintures en France 1440-1520 , 1993, p. 376). The artist was subsequently named as one Langres illuminator Pierre Garnier, who worked at the court of René d’Anjou between 1476-1480 (Lauga, 2007). Provenance : The fragmentary parent manuscript to which these and

• Binding: Hardcover

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