The Italian Model Book at the Morgan Library reconsidered: A study in secular imagery of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance

Description

My dissertation focuses on a late fourteenth-century Italian model book, preserved in The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Acc. No. II, 2-15), which presents a compendium of drawings of secular subjects. My study aims to resolve some issues that have provoked lively scholarly debate: the localization and dating of the drawings and their thematic and stylistic links with other works of art. My findings in these areas lead me to propose a possible circle of artists that may have produced these drawings. The study also sheds light on the working methods of these artists and the cultural milieu in which this imagery emerged. I use a somewhat novel method to localize and date this model book. Previously, scholars have tended to use style as their main evidence, with inconclusive results. My study undertakes to survey other works of art that contain similar imagery; I join this approach to an examination of style. Using comparable motifs for localizing and dating seemed especially apt because the recording of motifs is, of course, the usual purpose of model books. The problem, however, is that the images in model books are divorced from their original contexts so that the latter are very difficult to pinpoint for investigation. Therefore, the potential number of contexts for the imagery with respect to meaning and content is vast. I surveyed a very wide range of the secular imagery of this period and found that the richest connections are with the Tacuinum Sanitatis manuscripts and with astrological cycles in frescoes. Other important contexts for similar imagery are: liturgical manuscripts, juridical treatises, church portal sculpture, and courtly ivories with amorous sequences. The numerous connections with the Tacuinum Sanitatis illustrations suggest Milan as the probable place of origin of the Morgan drawings. However, as the Morgan images seem to relate more plausibly to the sources of the Tacuinum illustrations rather than to these illustrations themselves, the Morgan book probably was made before the extant Tacuina, likely c. 1360-80. The Morgan drawings are close stylistically to Milanese works of c. 1370-80 from the circle of the Lancelot and Guiron masters. This accords well with the results drawn from thematic contexts. An examination of comparable costumes, hairstyles, and armor supports the dating reached through a study of motifs and style. The one word written in the book, Magatelli, is from a Milanese dialect, and thus supports a localization to the Milanese ambient; the fifteenth-century script, possibly Northern Italian, suggests that the book continued to be used after the drawings were made.