Hindman and Rowe 2001

Hindman, Sandra and Nina Rowe, eds. Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 2001.

Reproductions: Transmission of Manuscript Illumination in the Nineteenth Century (103-175)

Hindman, “Reproductions”

By 18c, references to drawings being copied “per factor simile,” to make an exact likeness (106)

Jonathan Alexander distinguishes between historicist facsimiles and copies from model books

“The first facsimiles in the proper sense are, as Alexander points out, the replicas of earlier treasured codices made for the protohumanists of the fifteenth century, since it was only with the onset of the Renaissance that a sense of the historicity, the otherness of the past, opened up a gap between now and then that the facsimile could fill.” (106)

urge to make facsimiles grew in 18c — engravings of English charter made for Richard Rawlinson, Society of Antiquaries (106)

“The nineteenth century's most important and avid collector of illuminated books, Sir Thomas Phillipps, had professional illuminators copy both manuscripts and printed books for his collection. In 1865, his fellow collector John Camden Hotten sent Phillips a "very cleverly executed facsimile of Reynolds Herauldry of North Wales." In the accompanying letter, Hotten states that he had borrowed the book from its owner for a fortnight and that "I got my facsimilist to put forth his very best efforts in producing a copy." Another letter, this time from Phillipps to Hotten, speaks about a further occasion of copying a printed leaf: "I have received your . .. facsimile this morning and fortunately I had the Book itself in my house so that I could immediately compare it. Your copy is wonderfully exact and without the original anybody might be deceived. . .. Your worm holes are very neatly executed, but your rotten corner, if it is an imitation, is admirable. I have several printed books I should like to have perfected by imitation."*” (107)

“Such a practice was only possible because during this period the exemplary status of the object, it’s standing for a particular period or style, often mattered more than its authenticity.” (107)

“The popular appreciation of medieval illuminations was stimulated not by handmade copies, which remained unique and expensive objects, but by continual experimentation with those processes that made multiple copies of the same image available to a wide audience.” (107(

“The continuing impulse to reproduce medieval manuscripts throughout the nineteenth century accompanied, and gained momentum from, extensive experimentation with three technical processes woodcut and metal engraving, lithography and chromolithography, and photography- sometimes used in combination with each other.” (108)

“It was chromolithography that not only virtually made the careers of publishers such as Léon Curmer and Ambroise Firmin-Didot but also created a thriving market for drawings copied from manuscripts by facsim-ilists- -nineteenth-century illuminators for transfer to the lithographic plates.” (108)

Photography

“Photography eventually eliminated altogether the need for the copyist, although in the beginning facsimilists could take on piecework coloring in black-and-white photo-graphs, and photography ultimately changed the word "facsimile" from the active sense it had earlier in the century ("to facsimile") to a passive noun ("a facsimile").” (109)

Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments

“What is unusual for the time is the focus on ornament, which Madden excuses on partially practical grounds. He explains that the high cost of hand coloring and the difficulty in rendering faithfully the originals (citing the unsuccessful efforts of Abbé Rive) led them instead to trace the history of the "humbler branch of art" (as opposed to, say, panel paint-ings), which readers might nevertheless admire (pp. 1-2). It is also worth pointing out that Madden and Shaw display a precocious interest in illuminated incunabula, including works by Fust and Schoefer of Mainz and Nicolas Jensen of Venice, which has gone unnoticed.” (110)

“The aesthetic of the collage, which fabricates a new, independent work of art out of discrete miniatures and bits of ornament, manifests a radically different attitude than we now have toward the historical integrity of the "origi-nal." It is tempting to understand the manipulation of an object or objects, which the collage achieves, as a procedure fostered by new technologies. In chromolitho-graphy the object was dissected for printing from multiple stones or plates inked with different colors, then reassembled when printed on the surface of the page. Even facsimile printing itself opened up the possibilities of rearrangement and ad-justment. Whatever the underlying reasons, the popularity of the collage persisted through the nineteenth century.” (112)

Example of South Kensington Museum; Shaw recommends facsimiles because they are cleaner than books that have been used, museum, eventually buys his collections

Shaw calls his work “illuminated drawings”

Arundel Society - 1855, began using chromolithography to reproduce fresco, membership took off; public hungry for cheaper reproductions of art, which they sold with frames; same kind of fragmentation as ms illumination

1862, Society produced an alphabet book; popular genre in Victorian society; kind of reprisal of model book used by scribes

“the distinction between "original" and "facsimile" is blurred during this period. Shaw's and Sprega's copies made directly from the originals are considered, like their sources, to be "drawings" or originals, whereas the chromolithographs made after them are " "facsimiles" and the artist of the preparatory drawing is called the "facsimilist."” (122)

J O Westwood, inspired by d’Estang

Extra-illustrated copy of his drawings with six leaves from medieval manuscripts (123)

“This book is remarkable for two reasons. First, it preserves an exceptional illustrated record of the technical process of its creation, from Westwood's drawings for the zinc plates, to his proofs taken from the plates and printed on India paper, to the final hand-colored engravings (figures 60, 61, and 62, plates 14, Is), and finally to the insertion of original medieval illuminations within the modern volume. Second, it shows just how complex a facsimile could be, for Westwood's hybrid copy is, at the same time, an extra-illustrated volume, like an album, containing fifteenth-century illuminations alongside nineteenth-century drawings and proofs, and a facsimile of printed reproductions taken from original manuscripts. It was as though in this special volume Westwood was still clinging to the residual aura of the medieval manuscript book in the age of print, despite the fact that he success- (125) fully marketed the work as an inexpensive illustrated Bible rather than as a collection of facsimiles from illuminated manuscripts.” (123-5)

“Hardly a facsimile proper, since no medieval Bible contains such an odd amalgam of images, Westwood's Illuminated Illustrations of the Bible is a Victorian reimagining of a medieval manuscript for the pious art-loving public, and simultaneously a precursor to the gift book.” (125)

Caleb William Wing, restorer and maker for facsimiles of manuscripts

Bastard d‘Estang — funding from government, aimed to help restorers do their work more accurately

“Because Bastard preferred to retain a larger degree of manual control, his atelier in the rue St.-Dominique-St.-Germain was basically an artist's or craft atelier whose thirty employees (many of them Polish immigrants) were carefully trained artists rather than mere mechanical copyists. Bastard had the contours of the miniatures printed from a stone and then had each plate colored by hand. Artists would also add gold or platinum powder or leaf in an effort to recreate the exact appearance of the original in its current state of preservation.” (130)

Project was “as much a bespoke trade as medieval manuscript production, with a very small print run and very few actually copies available at an enormous cost” (130)

Later, was criticized for exorbitant expense

“Criticizing Bastard for never producing the explanatory text or describing which manuscripts were drawn upon in making his images, Hennin concluded that it would be better to produce facsimiles of one or two manuscripts from the Middle Ages than to reproduce all these fragments from so many different examples. What had seemed in the 183os like a wonderfully progressive and encyclopedic museum of manuscript monuments ap- (132) peared, only three decades later, after revolutions and upheavals in the very notion of what constituted French national identity, to be a mere collection of fragments.” (131-2)

Curmer

“In the work of Léon Curmer (1801-70), imagery derived from illumination penetrated religious publishing in France.” (132)

“The main framework for understanding Curmer’s enterprise is the revival of Catholicism and its impact on religious publishing during this turbulent period.” (132)

Saccharine religious imagery mid century; “curmer gave religious publishing a style based on medieval illumination that was of impeccably good taste. Curmer's deluxe publications of the 1850s and 186o exploited illuminated manuscripts as never before for religious ends. He typified the successful entrepreneurial publisher who managed to survive in the publishing revolution of the 1830s and 1840s, when new reproduction and distribution methods allowed cheap illustrated works and color printing to flourish.” (133)

Publishing in fascicles, serially; plain plates issued for DIY coloring

“It was not such much the prestige publications, but their ancillary offshoots in other publications and the resume of plates in other contexts, which contributed to Curmer’s commercial success.” (134)

Use of photography

Adherence to religious orthodoxy; “all the publications were designed as working tools for the devout” (135)

Engelmann

“In France, gift books were the near-exclusive province of the "inventor" of chromolithography, Godefroy nd tzel: Engelmann (I788-1839), who with his son, (Godefroy II (I814-97), founded the Société Engelmann, Père et Fils, in 1837, which became Engelmann et Graf in 1842, when Auguste Graf joined the company.” (136)

Statuts de l’Ordre du St. Esprit (1853)

“Such a lavish facsimile, which was still basically produced by hand, was still beyond the means of most people, and it was only after the midcentury in France, as the technical process of chromolithography was further mechanized and the process became standardized, that books reproducing not whole manuscripts in fac-simile, but isolated pages and miniatures from them, became fashionable. This fragmentation of the manuscript page in reproduction is related directly to manuscripts’ being cut up and collected, as described in the previous chapter. But it is also part of a general movement toward fragmentation that can be seen in the sculptural cast museums of the period and the Musee de Cluny in Paris, which showed the fragmentary remains of statues and paintings destroyed by revolutions, neglect, or just time.” (137)

Paul Lacroix

Catholic gift books, like Heures Royales (1838); later bought in 1840 by Curmer, who added chromolithographs; “Publishers offered such books in simple formats or in lavish bindings that could be specially ordered. It was works of this kind that, in France, definitively linked medieval style to Catholic piety, a link which flourishes even today.” (142)

Theophile Fragonard, Evangiles de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (1837), lithographed 15c borders in black and white

“Like the popular Books of Hours of the 15c, in which families also recorded momentous life and death events, these chromolithographed medievalizing prayer books served the 19c French market for pretty and affordable lives des famille.” (143)