This volume concludes the comprehensive description of all French manuscripts in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich that are decorated with book decoration, whereby the closely related Dutch and Flemish manuscripts were also included for stylistic reasons. Compared to vol. 7/1, the time frame here remains limited to about 140 years, which, however, can vary greatly in that both the demand for illuminated manuscripts and the mobile locations of certain illuminators as well as political change within the French regions were subject to rapid change.
Altogether this last catalogue volume 7/2 presents – by the way in a chronological much smaller frame than in volume 7/1 – a certain relation or mutual dependency concerning the respective bookillumination. The French king’s court remained locally movable during these 120 years, the political accents were directed to different places and with them also the demand in illuminated manuscripts and the stilistic character of miniatures changed. The greatest part of the described manuscripts are the 68 books of hours, several among them commissioned by a famous personality (for example the book of hours of Franois de Kerboutier or the socalled book of hours of Jacques Cœur). In addition we observe in those turbulent times not only the activity of numerous sciences, but also the specific return to the antiquity (for example Vergil). Or there there were produced copies of illuminated texts written by contemporary poets (Christine de Pisan, Francesco Petrarca or Giovanni Boccaccio). Another striking feature of book illumination produced during the 15th century in France and Flanders is the more frequent collaboration of several excellent miniaturists in a single manuscript. For example we see Jean Fouquet and the socalled Master of the Munich Boccaccio illuminating the famous „Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes“ by Giovanni Boccaccio in the Bavarian State Library. Other innovations in illuminated manuscripts have their roots in the flemish bookillumination and in flemish artists like Simon Bening, also represented in the Munich library. And finally there are described in this catalogue numerous manuscipts decorated in the Netherlands with a spartan and typical form of fleuronnée, used in monasteries of the socalled Devotio moderna.
Dr. Ulrike Bauer-Eberhardt
The art historian lives in Munich. She finished her studies 1982 with a dissertation about the illustrations of an astronomical-astrological manuscript, the Liber Introductorius by Michael Scot, in a Paduan copy kept in Munich. She was employed with the Bavarian State Collection of graphic arts in Munich, with the Corpus for Italian Drawings by Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt, had lecturships at the University Augsburg, several scholarships at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich and for several indipendent projects from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In the years between 1993 and 2003 she worked as translator and reader for the Publisher Hirmer in Munich, and for 4 years she was free collaborator of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Since 2003 she is in the employ of the Bavarian State Library, to write the academic Catalogues of the manuscripts with Italian and French bookillumination.
Ulrike Bauer-Eberhardt has always continued and cultivated her special subject, the Italian bookillumination, and she discovered and discussed in numerous publications Italian miniatures preserved all over the world (iconographic topics and different questions about the style). Moreover she organized exhibitions: 1984 the important presentation of Italian fragments of illuminated manuscripts in possession oft he Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, 2008 in the Bavarian State Library the Munich manuscripts of the Hungarian King Mathias Corvinus (Weltkulturerbe) or 2020 the exhibition „bella figura“ – a selection of the exciting illuminated manuscripts in Munich.
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