Who was Jean Bourdichon
Page from the Book of Hours by Jean Bourdichon.
Jean Bourdichon (1459–1521) was apprenticed to the Court painter, Jean Fouquet. Like his master, he was born, lived and died in Tours. Unlike his master, he has no statue, although his house (3 rue de la Serpe) is a protected monument.
Like Fouquet he became famous for his exquisite miniatures and illuminated manuscripts.
He succeeded Fouquet as Court Painter to Louis XI. Similarly appointed by Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I, he was invited to establish his atelier at Court in Château Plessis-les Tours. Bourdichon, like Fouquet, did anything and everything asked of him; religious paintings, altar pieces, decorations, town plans, parade shields, coats of arms, ensigns, standards, banners, coins and stained glass. He also designed wedding dresses, outfits for tournaments, funerals and “patterns for the dress and equipment of war.”
He also found fame because of a Book of Hours, Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne. Unlike Fouquet, whose commission came from a Court official albeit with the highest rank of Treasurer, Bourdichon received his from the Queen of France. She treasured it until her dying day. Because of its owner, Bourdichon’s Book is more well known than Fouquet’s.
One of the most magnificent Books ever made, it’s a monument of the French Renaissance in the Touraine. It has four hundred and seventy-six pages, forty-nine Renaissance style miniatures with Fouquet’s technique of highlighting in gold; three hundred pages with illuminated borders of accurate depictions of flowers and plants showing roots and bulbs with the plant's name in Latin and French, shrubs, trees, cereal crops, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetles, flies, carpenter bees, crickets, earwigs, snakes, lizards, slow worms, frogs, turtles, squirrels, snails, rabbits, monkeys and spiders.
The twelve calendar pages have scenes of the months of the year: the Queen’s heraldic devices; scenes from the Life of Christ; portraits of saints and a rare scene of the Virgin Mary being taught to read by the Queen’s patron saint, Saint Anne.
Anne’s second husband, Louis XII, commissioned Bourdichon to paint a portrait of Saint François de Paule who died at the convent of Plessis-les-Tours to send to Pope Leo X as a record of the saint’s canonisation.
When his adored wife Anne died, Louis felt it incumbent on him to provide France with the next king (he and Anne had two daughters). There was an heir presumptive, François I, but Louis disliked him (Anne, with good reason, hated him). He chose Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, to bear him a son. In 1514 Louis sent Jean Bourdichon to London to make sure Mary had a grand trousseau in the French style suitable for the Queen of France. Four months later Bourdichon supervised Louis’s funeral. There was no son.
Bourdichon’s legacy of superb craftsmanship and luxurious ornamentation was carried on by his students but the arrival of the printing press in 1440 hailed the beginning of the end of illuminated manuscripts.
The priceless Book of Hours remained in the French royal family for almost three hundred years until the Revolution. It is now owned by the State.
Bourdichon’s Masterpiece can be seen on the BnF website
Post by Pamela
