Ten leaves, drawn from ten unrelated manuscripts, make up this selection from the Bibliothèque et archives du château at Chantilly, and together they cover close to six centuries. The earliest is an imperial portrait painted at Trier around 983; the latest a bathing Susanna made for the constable Anne de Montmorency about 1550. Between them sit a calendar page from the Très Riches Heures, a Tree of Jesse from the Ingeborg Psalter, an Adoration by Jean Fouquet, a Venetian square, a Creation initial, two Greek philosophers, a hunting treatise, and a scene of courtly love.
A Library Assembled by Montmorency, Condé, and the Duc d’Aumale
The thread joining them is ownership, not origin. Holdings inherited from the dukes of Montmorency and the princes of Bourbon-Condé passed to Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, who bought steadily at European sales from 1848 and left the whole to the Institut de France.
From Ottonian Trier to the Loire Valley
The range is correspondingly wide. The Trier leaf, attributed to the Master of the Registrum Gregorii, carries an emperor identified as either Otto II or Otto III. The Josephus initial was written in the twelfth century at the abbey of Saint-Trond; the falconry treatise belonged to the Sforza, and its scribe signs himself Antonio de Lampugnano.
Devotion, Rule, and the Hunt
Books of hours and a psalter stand beside treatises on good conduct, on hunting, on a distant city — the reading of princes who governed, prayed, and rode.
What binds the ten is a collector’s eye, three centuries after the last of them was painted.
We have 1 facsimile edition of the manuscript "Masterpieces from the Musée Condé in Chantilly (Collection)": Meisterwerke aus dem Musée Condé im Schloss Chantilly facsimile edition, published by Mueller & Schindler
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