Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hoard Fever: Objects Lost and Found, Beowulf and Questions of Belonging
- 2 Lost Craft: Tracing Ships in the Early Medieval Riddling Tradition
- 3 Typological Exegesis and Medieval Architecture in Honorius Augustodunensis’s Gemma animae
- 4 Lost Objects and Historical Consciousness: The Post-Conquest Inventories at Ely
- 5 Fire! Accounts of Destruction and Survival at Canterbury and Bury St Edmunds in the Late Twelfth Century
- 6 Reweaving the Material Past: Textual Restoration of Two Lost Textiles from St Albans
- 7 Matthew Paris, Metalwork and the Jewels of St Albans
- 8 Illustrating the Material Past: A Pictorial Treasury in the Later Medieval Manuscripts from St Albans Abbey
- 9 Lost and Found: Gothic Ivories in Late Medieval French Household Records
- 10 Ivories in French Royal Inventories, 1325–1422: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age?
- 11 Parisian Painters and their Missing OEuvres: Evidence from the Archives
- 12 The Mythical Outcast Medieval Leper: Perceptions of Leper and Anchorite Squints
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Writing History in the Middle Ages
11 - Parisian Painters and their Missing OEuvres: Evidence from the Archives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Hoard Fever: Objects Lost and Found, Beowulf and Questions of Belonging
- 2 Lost Craft: Tracing Ships in the Early Medieval Riddling Tradition
- 3 Typological Exegesis and Medieval Architecture in Honorius Augustodunensis’s Gemma animae
- 4 Lost Objects and Historical Consciousness: The Post-Conquest Inventories at Ely
- 5 Fire! Accounts of Destruction and Survival at Canterbury and Bury St Edmunds in the Late Twelfth Century
- 6 Reweaving the Material Past: Textual Restoration of Two Lost Textiles from St Albans
- 7 Matthew Paris, Metalwork and the Jewels of St Albans
- 8 Illustrating the Material Past: A Pictorial Treasury in the Later Medieval Manuscripts from St Albans Abbey
- 9 Lost and Found: Gothic Ivories in Late Medieval French Household Records
- 10 Ivories in French Royal Inventories, 1325–1422: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age?
- 11 Parisian Painters and their Missing OEuvres: Evidence from the Archives
- 12 The Mythical Outcast Medieval Leper: Perceptions of Leper and Anchorite Squints
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Writing History in the Middle Ages
Summary
To fill the voids of material absence, documentary sources – whether literary or archival – can provide a precious, if sometimes precarious, path to the reconstruction of what has been lost. The estate inventory, a recounting of a decedent's worldly goods, is a category of historical informant whose revelations can redefine how we think about objects, both their qualities and quantities. While pitfalls exist with using this type of record, including issues of translation and representative sampling, estate inventories can nonetheless provide unique opportunities for insight. In the following examination of Parisian painting around the year 1500, a sample of seventy-three inventories from 1480 to 1515 is deployed to redefine how we think about this visual art.
Depending on the definition, the study of painting in Paris at the turn of the sixteenth century is either characterised by a resplendent field of extant objects that can be found in libraries and museums across the globe, or a striking paucity of material, totalling less than twenty-five published works. In its broader classification, painting encompasses illuminated manuscripts and triumphs by proxy through the production of models and cartoons for tapestries and stained glass, and prints used to illustrate books. A more restricted definition of the painterly arts, where the medium is exclusively associated with works on panel and canvas, produces a much different picture, an emaciation of the object record that appears at odds with the artistic fecundity seen in other, allied arts.
Despite the efforts of scholars like Charles Sterling to redress this dearth, the number of paintings attributed to Paris remains conspicuously low, especially when compared with the veritable glut of contemporary Italian and Netherlandish works. Explanations for this disparity have varied. Some have seen the hand of iconoclasm, whether Huguenot or Revolutionary, in the lacunae. For large-scale altarpieces destined for the church, published excerpts from contemporary documents seem to confirm material devastation, and of the fifteen ecclesiastical commissions that can be found in the archives, almost all have been lost. Of this sample, even very large, multi-panelled works – of which, given their size, one might expect at least a small portion to remain – have been completely deleted from the record. Take, for example, an altarpiece made for the governors of the confraternity of St Vincent at the church of St Paul in 1507.
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- Lost Artefacts from Medieval England and FranceRepresentation, Reimagination, Recovery, pp. 228 - 242Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022