Jean Duvet - Works

Works

His most famous works are his series of twenty-three engravings on the Apocalypse, the frontispiece of which (above) is dated 1555. They borrow heavily from the famous series in woodcut of Albrecht Dürer (1498) but are very different in style - crowded, even confused, but urgent and intense. Eight of the series derive their composition in some way from Dürer. This was published, with the accompanying text, in Lyon in 1561. Like many of his mature prints these use a round-topped shape. The frontispiece has the Latin inscriptions: "Jean Duvet goldsmith of Langres aged 70 made these histories 1555" (on the plate on the table) and "The Fates are pressing, already sight fails, the mind remains victorious, and the great work is completed" (by the swan), suggesting this was last of the series to be completed.

His other famous work is his series of six prints on the unicorn, still very personal but more lyrical in style; until the nineteenth century he was known as the "Unicorn Master" after these. Series celebrating the French monarchy and Genesis were left aside after a few plates each.

All seventy-three prints listed by Eisler are very rare - only seven copies of the Apocalypse with text are known, each with slightly different contents, although impressions of individual prints are commoner, and mostly earlier. Some individual engravings survive only in unique impressions. It is assumed that most of his prints in his characteristic crowded style and round-topped format date from the period 1540-55, based mainly on the 1555 date of the Apocalypse frontispiece. A few simpler but intense prints are usually taken to date from his last years, when his horror vacui, or inability to leave space unfilled, abated somewhat.

He copied prints by Marcantonio and Mantegna, and his burin technique is especially indebted to the former. A very free copy of Mantegna's Entombment shows him imposing his own vision with complete confidence on the composition of another artist.

Duvet's work contrasts strongly with the sophisticated art produced at the court of Fontainebleau. In its religious mysticism and quasi-Gothic sensibility, it partly harks back to the Middle Ages. Duvet's engraving known as Moses Surrounded by the Patriarchs (1540–50), for example, draws on a common medieval theme, the ancestors and antetypes of Christ. The driving force of Duvet's composition is the visionary nature of his material, which inspires him to place symbolic expression ahead of considerations of proportion, scale, or space. He also illustrates his texts literally. When St. John speaks of a voice "as if it were a trumpet", Duvet depicts a trumpet blasting into the saint's ear. The urgency and confidence of Duvet's vision triumph over his technical limitations. As well as recalling the medieval past, Duvet's work also looks forward to the more agitated style of the art produced during the French Wars of Religion later in the sixteenth century.

Duvet's work was produced, like that of Rosso and Pontormo in the Florence of the 1520s, in an urban atmosphere of religious excitement, since the town of Langres was in the grip of an enthusiastic and emotional Catholic revival at the time. Duvet shares with those Florentine artists the style of distorted and crowded figures and borrowings from Dürer, though his use of Gothic elements is more pronounced. Some scholars have also compared Duvet's art to that of William Blake (1757–1827). Both were visionary artists with the "supreme confidence of the mystic"; both were in some ways technically incompetent. They were also both inspired by medieval artists and by engravers of the High Renaissance and drew on Mannerist forms. Blake may have known of the earlier artist, since certain echoes of Duvet's work in Blake's seem more than coincidental.