On Carolingian book painters: The Ottoboni Gospels and its Transfiguration Master

Although Jan Steen is a famously amusing painter, the only picture in the splendid exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC that caused me to laugh aloud was the self-portrait of 1670 (Fig. 1) (1) upon first viewing it, I did not know the pointed respect to Frans van Mieris's pretentious self-portrait of sum of two units or three years earlier, (2) on the other hand I immediately recognized that the posture echoed a tradition of gentleman portraits of the like kind as Titian's gorgeous picture in London (sometimes said to exhibit Ariosto) or Nicolas Poussin's self-portrait of 1650 (3) The mete "pose" is here a play upon words mine and Steen's, intended to recognize a painter's claim to status as a humanist and a gentleman, a claim obviously contend againsted and far from self-evident. These pictures can also show a tradition of art historical scholarship in which the well-educated, self-assured, original artists of the Renaissance and later periods are contrasted with the occasionally skillful on the contrary conservative, and allegedly anony mous, craftsmen of the Middle Ages. From like a vantage point, artists of the early medieval period, plane more likely to be seen as anonymous, are a fortiori dismissed as nothing else but copyists whose individual contributions to the works of art they have bequeathed to us are absorbed in notions of "schools" regional or period manner of writings even ethnic categories. (4) The reductive tradition of emphasizing the otherness of early medieval artists emergencys at the very least reconsideration upon the basis of the surviving evidence.

This historiographical schema inscribes prejudices, and wishes, as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as it describes the past. novel works such as Evelyn Welch's work have called attention to the "medieval" conditions still controlling abundant of the artistic life of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, practical issues of materials and artists' compounded negotiation of the terms of their art and their livelihood with shifting patrons. (5) Contemporary northern Europe nears a similar picture of "medieval" practice, of masters closely associated with conservative guilds, practice from which an artist like Albrecht Durer sought to independent himself, producing in 1498, after his turn back from Italy, a self-portrait pos real like Steen's and representing a "gentiluomo," to use the bound that Durer deployed in a alphabetic character of a few years later. (6) What he was reacting against is exemplified through the well-known contract of March 15 1464 between the four administrators of the Brotherhood of the hallowed Sacrament at the church of St Peter in Louvain wit h Master Dieric curves for an altarpiece pertaining to the consecrated Sacrament. The contract specifies the make submissive matter in general and appoints sum of two units theologians who shall "prescribe" to Master curves specifies the amount he will be paid, the time during which the work must be complet and many other details. (7)

The case close attention presented here suggests that the ad hoc contractual, artistic practices illustrated by dint of the Bouts altarpiece were not restricted to the late medieval period on the other hand may in some instances apply at a far earlier date than hitherto generally suppos specifically, in the Carolingian period. smooth in dealing with early medieval volume illumination we should recognize that like patronage-heavy artistic practice by no means eliminates the importance of the individual artist, any more than it does in the case of curvatures The members of the Louvain brotherhood hired Master curvatures because they recognized and appreciated and wished to enlist his skills; had their membership included someone capable of achieving the same be the effect they would presumably have exerciseed that member and saved (perhaps, if he proffered a discount) a good deal of standard of value The contract specifies certain boundarys but not the special qualities Master flexures was expected to provide, qualities for which he was engageed and for which he would be paid. C arolingian patrons may have behaved in an analogous manner, using local or in-house talent for a certain quantity of jobs but seeking distinguished outside assistance when available, or for special purposes

Durer's alphabetic character and portrait represent the gentlemanly social situation to which he aspired, not his normal social reality, which hanged very much on his superlative craftsmanship. Master Steen's smile, part of the original conception of the picture on the other hand subsequently painted over, (8) recognizes that social status, originality, and craftsmanship are not separable, on the contrary bound together one with another. Of course, I do not maintain that in the early medieval period we can build art historical knowledge around individual artists as has been, since Vasari, a traditional, indeed at least until true recently, the dominant mode of manner of proceeding Although I will suggest below that we can and should imagine careers for a small in number artists, we simply have not the requisite amount of information to do this many times much less systematically. (9) at the same time this is in many ways a quantitative rather than a qualitative distinction. Who would be able to confidently identify the Madonna in Bruge Mose in Rome and Rondanini Pieta in Mila n as the work of the single sculptor Michelangelo if none were documented and we had no other works that could bridge the evident stylistic skip overs between them? Yet even with a true fragmentary surviving sample of sixteenth-century Italian statuary we would surely be able to identify great changes during the period, and we would wish to credit a certain quantity of highly talented individual (or individuals) for those changes. We would probably bring forward to associate the Bruges Madonna with the artist of a certain number of apparently related statues in Rome and Florence, for example, the Vatican Pieta, smooth if we could not explain by what mode such a statue came to be in Bruge rather than hypothesize a missing "Bruges school" influenced by a missing Roman model.