Gregory Clark's new book on the early fifteenth-century prayerbook now known as the Spitz Hours (Los Angeles, Getty Museum MS 57, 94.ML.26) is framed as an introductory study of a relatively unknown, but artistically significant, illuminated manuscript. Written in a deceptively simple style and aimed at a general audience, Clark's slender softcover book contains many insights for its professional audience as well. The joys of this book include the numerous high quality colorplates that reproduce nearly every image in the Spitz Hours, as well as examples from other key manuscripts of the period.
The four chapters of the book include an Introduction (1-4), a discussion of "The Texts and Miniatures of the Spitz Hours" (5-52), a chapter on "The Illustrators of the Spitz Hours (53- 86), and a contextualization of the manuscript in "The Spitz Hours and Parisian Manuscript Illumination" (87-93). The end matter of the book includes a brief codicological description and a complete listing of its bibliography, a section of more use to the manuscript specialist (94-96), and a one-page narrative "Suggestions for Further Reading" aimed at the general reader (97).
The book begins with a color plate of the Spitz Hours, open to an illumination of the Flagellation of Christ and the facing prayer that accompanies it (Fig. 1). Such images are one way to emphasize the physical qualities of an illuminated manuscript, and Clark capitalizes on this in his text by discussing the physical dimensions of the manuscript -- given in inches, again catering to the general reader -- and the qualities that made it particularly luxurious, such as the notable width of its margins. In medieval books, as in modern ones, wide margins can be an indicator of de luxe status. It is interesting to note in this context that the design of The Spitz Master echoes the luxurious qualities of its subject. While it is somewhat larger in dimensions than the Getty manuscript, its proportions are similar, and its design also combines wide margins, emphasized capitals at chapter incipits, full page (color) illuminations, and smaller column miniatures and marginal images, many of which are also in color.
Early on, Clark informs his readers that the Spitz Hours, as a manuscript, would have been written by hand (2), an important fact for the general reader of this book. Clark's discussion of the book of hours as a type, which concludes his Introduction, takes about two pages (2-4) and provides a concise primer on the function and contents of the late medieval best-seller.
The second chapter explores each one of the Getty manuscript's illuminations in turn, and is illustrated with full-page colorplates of all of the illuminations. Clark's examination of the illuminations plays several roles in his book. First, this discussion provides readers of all levels with an intimate understanding of the iconography of this particular manuscript, and also provides a sense of what was typical of contemporary books of hours. This chapter also evokes the narrative importance these images held for their medieval viewers. The most common way to see such images today is as separate paintings, plucked out of their physical context and displayed as examples of a certain style in scholarly works or textbooks, or even as seasonal illustrations for calendars or notecards. For the medieval owner of a luxurious manuscript like the Spitz Hours, however, each illumination was intended to be used in the context of prayer, although the images might have functioned more practically as separate points on a narrative continuum that proceeded throughout the book of hours. While Clark's chapter spends little time on the textual context of these images, he imparts a strong sense of their story-telling role.
Clark's book begins with a statement of his thesis: "A work of art that documents a major shift in aesthetic direction at a specific time and place is always an object of considerable significance. When that work is also both little-known and an artistic tour de force, its study promises to be especially rewarding" (1). While the second chapter serves to acquaint us with this "little- known work," the third and fourth chapters turn to the core of Clark's argument by examining the painting styles of the Hours' illuminators, and then showing how these styles "document a major shift" in Parisian manuscript art around 1420. Even in this more analytical part of the book, Clark tries to maintain an introductory tone by explaining the differences between modern and medieval conceptions of the role of artists (53-54). After discussing how rarely medieval artists can be identified by name, Clark turns to a short history of the development of naturalistic spatial representations in French Gothic illuminations. To do this, he compares paintings from books of hours attributed, for the most part, to named artists -- Jean Pucelle, Jean Le Noir, Jacquemart de Hesden, the Boucicaut Master, and the Limbourg brothers (54-59). Clark then points out that despite these developments in representation, the Spitz Master's work shows a decided preference for surface design over spatial illusion. As he puts it, "the Spitz Master chose to pause on the road to the mastery of actual appearances to revisit and reaffirm the venerable medieval traditions of line, pattern, and formal repetition" (59). This frames Clark's discussion of the differences between the avant-garde illusionism that reached an epitome in the work of the Limbourgs, and a conservative medieval style typical of much subsequent Parisian manuscript illumination.
Clark begins this discussion, as the third chapter continues, by examining the style of all extant works by the artist we now call the Spitz Master (59-86). These include all but three of the full-page illuminations in the Spitz Hours, as well as some of the paintings in two other books of hours (Chantilly, Mus. Conde, MS 66, and New York, Morgan Library, M. 1004). Examination of paintings by the Spitz Master and the artists who collaborated with him on the Spitz Hours (the Master of the Harvard Hannibal and the Master of the Guise Hours) suggests that the Getty manuscript was produced around 1420. Clark compares illuminations by the Spitz Master with examples by the Boucicaut Master and the Limbourg brothers and demonstrates that the Spitz Master had access to these paintings, or to model books or exemplars shared by all these artists. These comparisons are used to demonstrate how the Spitz Master continued to focus on surface embellishment rather than exploiting possibilities for the depiction of spatial illusion.
Clark begins his brief concluding chapter by summarizing all that his readers have learned so far from his book. Then he places the work of the Spitz Master within a broader context of contemporary and subsequent Parisian illuminators. Their surviving illuminations demonstrate a turn away from the interest in illusionism so apparent in the works of the Limbourgs and their predecessors, toward the more conservative, medieval style of the Spitz Master (87-93). The most interesting question Clark explores here is why this shift occurred and, like some previous scholars, he suggests that the answer may lie in part in the Hundred Years' War.[[1]] In 1420, when the Spitz Hours may have been created, Philip of Burgundy signed the Treaty of Troyes and thus made Henry V of England heir to the throne of France at the death of Charles VI. While Charles outlived Henry by a few months, England (in the person of John, Duke of Bedford) retained control of Paris and northern France (91). It is possible that the more conservative painting style in manuscripts surviving from the second quarter of the fifteenth century was, as Clark suggests, a way for illuminators to reaffirm a traditional French identity. Clark also notes that the major French court patrons of the preceding decades had been exiled, and that the prevailing style in England at that time was much more surface-oriented. Perhaps the artists were simply giving their new patrons what they wanted, just as they always had.
Clark's book is a pleasure to hold and to read. The one concern of this reviewer is that the last two chapters appear to argue that the goal of the important named artists was the mastery of spatial illusionism. It follows that the more decorative style of the Spitz Master and his contemporaries represents a halt in an inevitable evolutionary development. While such mastery would certainly have been a factor in the successful careers of the Limbourgs (for example), Clark's argument might reaffirm the public misconception that the goal of all artists is to reproduce what they see. This misconception, influenced by the apparently effortless illusionism of large-scale painting from the Renaissance period and beyond, is so entrenched that it makes much medieval painting unapproachable for the general public. At best, medieval painting often is viewed as quaint or naive. On the other hand Clark's lucid prose, enlivened by a sense of affection for the Spitz Master and his "willful, masterful, and enchanting conservatism" (59), goes a long way toward remedying this potential problem.
As university presses publish fewer single- manuscript studies, it is cheering to see institutions like the Getty produce well-written and beautifully-illustrated -- yet very inexpensive -- volumes like The Spitz Master. This is only the second volume in the "Getty Museum Studies on Art" to examine one of their illuminated manuscripts, following Elizabeth Teviotdale's book on The Stammheim Missal (2001). This reviewer hopes that more of the Getty's marvelous library will come to light in similar publications, meant for a general readership but full of pleasures for the scholar.
NOTES [[1]] See for example Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: the Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (New York, 1974), vol. 1, p. 251.
--