Some Illustrations of the Life of St. Aubin (Albinus) of Angers (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms n. a.l. 1390) and Related Works

The Cabinet des manuscrits of the Bibliotheque nationale contains a slim volume devoted to the life and miracles of St. Aubin (Albinus), bishop of Angers in the sixth century. The manuscript was produced at the abbey of St.-Aubin in Angers toward the end of the eleventh century. It consists simply of seven folios, covered on each side with a full-page miniature. The first chapter of the dissertation discusses the history, provenance, date, and condition of the manuscript; the second chapter provides a detailed description of each folio, including excerpts from the relevant hagiographic texts. The internal evidence of the work itself, as well as a comparison with other examples of illustrated manuscripts of the lives of the saints (chapter IV), indicate that the illustrations were originally much more extensive, that they were accompanied by a series of texts, and that the pictorial life once served as a preface to a prose biography of the saint. The third chapter provides an iconographic study of the surviving miniatures of the Vita Sancti Albini. Comparisons were made with other illustrated vitae; a second approach dealt with the internal components of the manuscript, the texts and their illustrations. The miniatures were produced at the end of the eleventh century and were based on two prose texts, from the sixth and the eleventh centuries. The intellectual, social, and religious changes which occurred during the intervening centuries became evident from a comparison of the two groups of texts, as well as from the frequently anachronistic reinterpretation of the original biography at the hands of an artist so far removed from his subject. The Vita Sancti Albini has long been associated with a group of paintings produced in Anjou ca. 1100. These include the problematic Bible of St.-Aubin, portions of a psalter in Amiens, and the Genesis cycle in the transepts of the church of St.-Jean-Baptiste at Chateau-Gontier. A detailed stylistic analysis of these works, provided in chapter V, isolates the distinctive qualities of the master of the Vita Sancti Albini and concludes that the remaining works should be assigned to a number of different artists working over a period of several years. These Angevin paintings are the culmination of an active school of manuscript illumination which can be traced at least as far back as the early eleventh century and which extended into the early twelfth century. Most scholars have considered Angers an artistic vacuum until the end of the eleventh century. The material assembled in chapters VI-VII demonstrates that this assumption is unwarranted: although most of the manuscript decoration from Angers and related centers in the Loire valley (Tours, Fleury, Vendome, and Le Mans) consists of ornamented initials, and not narrative cycles, there is sufficient evidence to assign an important role to local artistic tradition in the development of the style found in Angers toward the end of the eleventh century.