Simon Marmion - Manuscripts

Manuscripts

His masterpiece, a Grandes Chroniques de France, is now in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg. This has 25 large miniatures (215 x 258 mm) and 65 smaller ones, ranging in style from brilliantly-coloured battle-scenes to some in an innovative near-grisaille style, with just touches of subdued colour. The illustrations reflect the text, which is an unusual version stressing Netherlandish events, and apparently intended to justify Philip the Good's claim to the French throne. The same library has a medical text with a fine presentation miniature with another portrait of Phillip the Good, and heraldic borders.

His manuscript of The Visions of Tondal in the Getty Museum (1475) is another important work, and he also produced many more conventional Books of Hours and other manuscripts; his most elaborate book of hours is the Huth Hours (ca. 1480) in the British Library, with 24 full-page miniatures, and 74 smaller ones. In a book of hours now in Naples, known as la Flora he painted 22 full-page miniatures that pioneered close-up small groups of a few figures seen at half-length, which represent "his most distinctive illumination and perhaps his greatest achievement". The Morgan Library and Huntington Library also have fine books of hours by Marmion.

The "Simon Marmion Hours" (not the only manuscript so called) in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1475–81) is, with pages 11 x 7.6 cm (4 3/8 x 3 in.), an example of the fashion for very small but lavish books of hours. Here the borders are especially fine, in some cases going beyond the usual flowers and foliage to include ones showing collections of ivory and enamel plaques, and other pilgrim's souvenirs arrayed on shelves. The book appears to have been made without a specific owner in mind, as there is none of the usual heraldry in the borders and the choice of saints' days included in the calendar is generalized for Bruges and Northern France - by this period books of hours could be bought ready-made, but not usually of this quality. The only full-page miniature without borders in the book is an unusual scene of Heaven and Hell, opposite a Last Judgement on the facing page. The lower two thirds show a fiery hellish landscape, while above naked figures cross a narrow bridge over a lake to a grassy park-like heaven - if they can evade the devils with hooked poles in the water, who try to grab them. Many scenes in the Getty Tondal, and a large Dream of Charles the Bald in the Petersberg Chroniques also contain striking images on these themes, anticipating those of Hieronymous Bosch.