Tabernacle with the Study of St Jerome

Author: Rosie Razzall

This page from Pisanello’s so-called taccuino di viaggio (traveller’s notebook)^[1] shows a Gothic chamber or tabernacle with an elaborately decorated upper register covered with tracery, statues and carved finials. Inside the room is a crucifix on an altar, and two empty niches at either side with books resting above on high shelves. The focus of the drawing is on the intricate details of the architecture and statuary, which are carefully marked out in pen and ink.

The drawing is one of two copies in the taccuino after another complete composition that shows St Jerome seated in his study. While the architectural setting was represented on the Rotterdam sheet, the figure of the saint reading at a lectern was drawn on a separate page of the taccuino that is now in Paris.^[2] The entire composition is recorded in the frontispiece to a Bible moralisée in Paris (fig.),^[3] begun in 1402 for Philip II (1342-1404), Duke of Burgundy. This manuscript is connected to the workshop of the brothers Paul (1387?-1416) and Johan Limbourg (138?-1416), with the frontispiece pasted separately into the volume and its authorship the subject of much scholarly debate.^[4] The Louvre and Rotterdam drawings were briefly believed to be preparatory studies for this frontispiece,^[5] but scholars have long since agreed that the three sheets share a common, now lost source;^[6] probably a drawing by the Limbourg brothers, though a panel painting or miniature have also been proposed.^[7] This theory of a much-copied common source is corroborated by the existence of other repetitions of parts of the same composition. These include a very similar architectural setting that appears in a miniature of the Madonna Ecclesia (Madonna in the Church) in the Isabella Stuart Book of Hours in Cambridge,^[8] produced in Angers by 1431 by the Rohan Master and others for Yolande of Aragon (1380-1442), Duchess of Anjou. The bookshelves in this miniature are much closer to those in the Rotterdam drawing than the ones in the Paris frontispiece.^[9] The figure reading at a lectern, depicted in the Louvre drawing, also appears in three folios in another manuscript by the Limbourgs, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry in New York^[10]: twice with St Jerome, and a third time slightly adapted as St Catherine, with a similar free-standing lectern to that in the Bible moralisée frontispiece. This lectern also appears in the Annunciation by Barthélémy d’Eyck (active 1444-1470) in Aix-en-Provence,^[11] and a manuscript in New York.^[12] A loosely related scene with St Jerome also appears in a manuscript from the workshop of the Limbourg brothers in the Vatican.^[13]

The Rotterdam drawing has been connected to Pisanello since the 1950s, when two scholars noted stylistic affinities to his work in the study on the verso of a standing woman holding a helmet under her arm.^[14] This figure was drawn at the right-hand edge of the page in the former notebook when it was rotated 90 degrees, with the rest of the page left blank. The woman wears a long gown with generous sleeves fashionable in the first decades of the fifteenth century, and a large rounded headdress known as a balzo, constructed over willow branches and covered with layers of false hair.^[15] Degenhart connected this figure with the Arthurian sagas that Pisanello worked on for the Gonzaga family in Mantua from 1422 onwards,^[16] and as such it can be compared with a drawing in Vienna of a seated woman with falcons.^[17] Dominique Cordellier suggested that the figure is a copy after Michellino da Besozzo (c.1370-c.1455), a miniature painter in the circle of Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano (c.1370-1427).^[18] Degenhart/Schmitt also compare the figure to heraldic motifs.^[19]

Given the Rotterdam drawing’s undisputed provenance from the taccuino di viaggio, any doubt that the sheet can be associated with Pisanello’s workshop must now be dispelled,^[20] though the sheet and its Paris counterpart are nevertheless accepted as being by a member of Pisanello’s workshop rather than the artist himself.^[21] A more intriguing question is how and where the artist was able to access this motif of French origin. Degenhart and Schmitt suggested that Pisanello saw book illustrations by the Limbourg brothers in the library of the Visconti in Pavia;^[22] Meiss proposed that the Limbourgs may have left drawings behind in Milan or Pavia during a trip to Italy;^[23] while Lowden and Avril put forward Naples, where the Bible moralisée ‘Français 166’ was in the possession of René d’Anjou, who reigned as King of Naples from 1435 to1442, and where Pisanello visited briefly in the early 1420s.^[24] The precise circumstances in which the copies were made may never be known, but the Rotterdam and Paris drawings are important examples of the cross-fertilization of ideas and motifs between France and Italy.

Aside from these questions of attribution and origin, the Rotterdam drawing is interesting in regard to its function in the taccuino. Degenhart/Schmitt rightly noted the stiffness of the Paris frontispiece, versus the freedom of line in the Rotterdam and Paris sheets, where the two motifs have been separated into parts that could be easily repurposed.^[25] This is also suggested by the lower foreground, which is left blank for a figure to be added, and by the area below the altar where the penwork becomes increasingly schematic.^[26] Whether a manuscript, painting or other object was intended is impossible to determine, and the two drawings may simply have been made as a means of gathering and practising motifs. Though most drawings in the taccuino refer to classical sculpture or studies from life, a small number are studies of Gothic tracery (for example, a sheet in Vienna).^[27] Their inclusion demonstrates the wide variety of sources with which Pisanello’s workshop was familiar.