Simon Marmion
Simon Marmion (c. 1425 – 24 or 25 December 1489) was a French and
Life
Like many painters of his era, Marmion came from a family of artists, and both his father, Jean, and his brother Mille were painters. Marmion is recorded as working at Amiens between 1449 and 1454, and then at Valenciennes from 1458 until his death. He was patronized by Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy from 1454 when he was one of several artists called to Lille to work on the decorations for the Feast of the Pheasant.[1] He was employed by several members of the ducal family, including Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. He was called "the prince of illuminators" by a near contemporary. Three years after his death his widow, Jeanne de Quaroube, married his pupil, the painter Jan Provoost, who on her death inherited the considerable Marmion estate.
Although best known for his illuminated manuscripts, Marmion also produced portraits and other paintings,
Manuscripts
His masterpiece, a
His manuscript of
The "Simon Marmion Hours" (not the only manuscript so called) in the
Identity questioned
Between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century, art historians attributed various works to Marmion. However, from 1969, a scholarly counter-movement led by art historian Antoine de Schruyver suggested that Marmion's body of work came from a number of hands.[13] At its largest figures, Marmion's oeuvre amounts to some 40 each of manuscripts and panel paintings, but though his life and his reputation are both covered by contemporary documentation, he cannot be clearly connected by documents to specific surviving works - most of the biographical documentation relates to his ownership of real estate property.[10]
The circumstantial evidence is strong: the abbot at Saint-Omer (near Valenciennes) who commissioned the St. Bertin altarpiece, Guillaume Filastre, also commissioned the Petersberg Chroniques and another MS by the same artist. Marmion is recorded as producing a breviary ordered by Philip the Good between 1467 and 1470, and a detached miniature in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Lehman Collection) may come from this.[14]
Notes
- ^ Campbell, 300
- ^ Strictly, the shutters normally used to cover up a carved altarpiece. The "inside" side is in grisaille.
- ^ Campbell, 300-309
- ^ Kren & S McKendrick, 100-102, 107 Metropolitan
- ^ Voronova & Sterligov, 120
- ^ Voronova & Sterligov, 118-119
- ^ Kren & S McKendrick, 98
- ^ British Library
- ^ T Kren, in Kren & S McKendrick, 330
- ^ a b Harthan, 148
- ^ Illus. Harthan, 150
- ^ Harthan, 148, illus. 147
- ^ JSTOR The Case of Simon Marmion: Attributions & Documents, Sandra Hindman, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Vol 40, H. 3/4 (1977), pp. 185-204.
- ^ Campbell, 300 Metropolitan, who are more confident of the identification
References
- Campbell, Lorne. National Gallery Catalogues (new series): The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 1998, ISBN 1-85709-171-X
- Harthan, John, The Book of Hours, pp. 146–151, 1977, Thomas Y Crowell Company, New York, ISBN 0-690-01654-9
- T Kren & S McKendrick (eds), Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe, Getty Museum/Royal Academy of Arts, pp. 98–116 & passim, 2003, ISBN 1-903973-28-7
- T. Voronova and A Sterligov, Western European Illuminated Manuscripts (in the St Petersberg Public Library), pp. 118–133, 2003, Sirocco, London
Further reading
- Kren, Thomas, ed. Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and The Visions of Tondal. Malibu, CA, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992.
Short books on individual MS:
- Kren, Thomas, and Wieck, Roger. The Visions of Tondal from the Library of Margaret of York, J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, 1990, ISBN 978-0-89236-169-4
- Thorpe, James. Book of Hours: Illuminations by Simon Marmion, Huntington Library Press; New edition 2000, ISBN 0-87328-130-6
External links
- Simon Marmion at Artcyclopedia
- Marmion in the pages of Getty Museum
- Simon Marmion's miniatures in the Book of Hours of Sir John Donne
- Getty Tondal miniatures only (full turn the pages at Getty link above)
- Louvain University Library Information and Bibliography (in French)
- Fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European paintings: France, Central Europe, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain, a collection catalog fully available online as a PDF, which contains material on Simon Marmion (see index)