Identity Questioned
Between the late 19th century and the mid-20th century, art historians attributed various works to Marmion. However from 1969, a scholarly counter-movement lead by art historian Antoine de Schruyver suggested that Marmion's body of work came from a number of hands. At its largest figures, Marmion's oeuvre amounts to some 40 each of manuscripts and panel paintings, but though his life and his reputation are both covered by contemporary documentation, he cannot be clearly connected by documents to specific surviving works - most of the biographical documentation relates to his ownership of real estate property.
The circumstantial evidence is strong: the abbot at Saint-Omer (near Valenciennes) who commissioned the St. Bertin altarpiece, Guillaume Filastre, also commissioned the Petersberg Chroniques and another MS by the same artist. Marmion is recorded as producing a breviary ordered by Philip the Good between 1467 and 1470, and a detached miniature in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Lehman Collection) may come from this.
Read more about this topic: Simon Marmion
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