EX HI BIT S

This article deals with two museumson opposite sides of the United

States, and seemingly very disparate artobjects. What unifies them is the historyof a great nation-state, France, and itscontribution to universal culture.

One object is the chalice of the AbbotSuger, which was shaped under theguiding mind of this Twelfth Centurynation-builder who gave Gothic cathe-drals to the world. The other is theHours of Simon de Varie, a preciousmanuscript of c.1455 with five minia-tures from the hand of Jean Fouquet,France’s great Renaissance painter,

which is now divided between two col-lections, the J. Paul Getty Museum inMalibu, California, and the RoyalLibrary in The Hague. This manuscript’shistory is closely tied to the creation ofthe modern French nation under KingLouis XI and his allies.

The Hours of Simon de Varie was fea-tured in a special exhibit honoring Fou-quet at the Malibu Getty Museum fromApril 26 to July 10, while Suger’s Chal-ice is on permanent display at theNational Gallery of Art in Washington.Both are described and lavishly illustrat-ed in two new books: The Hours of

Simon de Varie, byJames H. Marrowwith a contributionby François Avril(Getty MuseumMonographs, The J.Paul Getty Museum,Malibu, in associationwith KoninklijkeBibliothek, TheHague, 1994) (slip-cased, 249 pages,$95.00); and WesternDecorative Arts, Part I(The Collections ofthe National Galleryof Art SystematicCatalogue, NationalGallery of Art,Washington, D.C.,and Cambridge Uni-versity Press, Lon-don, 1993) (cloth-bound, 331 pages,$160.00).

The entry on Sug-er’s chalice in the newcatalogue is writtenby Pamela Vandiverof the SmithsonianInstitution’s conser-vation and analytical

laboratory, and dwells heavily on tech-nical details. According to Vandiver, thechalice is one of nine liturgical vesselsthat Suger added to his Abbey church.This one was reserved for use on thealtar dedicated 850 years ago to St. Denys, the martyr and protector ofFrance.

The cup of the chalice, a semi-pre-cious sardonyx, was chiseled and pol-ished into a fluted cup in antiquity, pre-sumably in Alexandria in the time ofthe Ptolemies, c.200 B.C. The flutesimpose a regular pattern over the mar-bled veins of the red, black, and whitestone. We do not know who the originalowner was, but by A.D. 1140 it hadfound its way into the hands of Suger,an avid collector of antique gems, whohad it reset as a chalice, adding unusualdouble filigrees of gold notched wire,precious stones, and double pearls (thejewels were replaced long since withpaste glass).

The chalice would have quite a taleto tell if it could speak. In 1567, duringthe Catholic-Hugenot religious wars,the Royal Abbey of St.-Denis near Paris,where the chalice had been part of thetreasury for over three centuries, wassacked. In 1791, in fulfillment of thelaw nationalizing the monastic orders, itwas taken away from St.-Denis anddeposited at the National Cabinet ofMedals and Antiquities, part of theFrench state collections. The FrenchRevolution not only deposed the monar-chy, but its anti-clerical wrath led to thedevastation of many churches, lootingand disursing religious artifacts. Thechalice was stolen and smuggled out ofthe country by an Englishman in 1804,and remained hidden from view in anEnglish private collection until it wasfinally sold to a dealer sometime before1922, and purchased by the Pennsylva-nia millionaire Joseph Widener, who

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Art Gives an Intimate LookAt the Great Men Who Built France

J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

Jean Fouquet, “Coat of Arms Held by a Woman and aGreyhound,” from the “Hours of Simon de Varie.”

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bequeathed his art collection to theNational Gallery.

Suger, as the remnants of the RoyalAbbey of St.-Denis which date from hislifetime reveal, had an keen sense ofnegative curvature. In the setting of hischalice, the foot originally extended outin an elegant hyperbolic curve, suchthat a perpendicular line drawn fromthe outer rim of the foot would havebeen tangent to the internal curl of thecup handle above it. We know thisfrom a watercolor drawing made of thechalice in 1633 [SEE illustration]. Thepresent-day, simple-conical form is theresult of a restoration made in moderntimes.

Suger Refused To Be Small

Suger became abbot of St.-Denis in1122. During the Second Crusade hewas a Regent of France. At his deaththis man, who had spent his life as amonk and abbot, was declared a Pater

Patriae. His epitaph reads: “Small ofbody and family, constrained by twofoldsmallness, / He refused, in his smallness,to be a small man.”

Suger was an able administrator,an acute businessman, one of the firstmedieval historians, and an outstand-ing patron of the arts. Art historianErwin Panofsky was the first to firstprove we owe the launching of“Gothic architecture” to this extraor-dinary man’s rebuilding of the RoyalAbbey of St.-Denis. His influenceover King Louis VI led to the creationof France as a centralized power,capable of subduing the various feu-dal lords whose armies, wealth, anddominion often matched those of thetitular monarch.

The Royal Abbey was the homechurch of the French monarchy, whereall the royal crowns and coronationrobes were kept, and the kings ofFrance were buried. Tradition said

that the patron saint of France, Diony-sius (Denys), and his two companions,Sts. Eleutherius and Rusticus, weremartyred on the site of the Abbey.Denys was believed to have been aGreek disciple of St. Paul, converted bythe great missionary apostle in Athensin the first Christian era, and later sentfrom Rome to evangelize Gaul; and tohim were attributed the theologicalworks of a Platonist who actually livedin the fifth and sixth centuries, Denysthe Areopagite.

Suger read deeply in this Pseudo-Dionysius, who was the source for hismetaphysics of light, but he was mostintensely influenced in theology by thegreatest of Christian Platonists, St. Augustine. The inscription whichhe had placed on the golden doors ofthe west facade introduces his thought:“Marvel not at the gold and theexpense but at the craftsmanship of thework. / Bright is the noble work, but,being nobly bright, the work / Shouldbrighten the minds, so that they maytravel, through the true light, / To theTrue Light where Christ is the truedoor.”

Inside the sanctuary, the resplendentliturgical vessels and other altar furnish-

Left: The chalice of Abbot Suger, on display at theNational Gallery of Art. Top: This 1633 drawingof the chalice shows the hyperbolic curve of theoriginal foot, prior to a modern-day restoration.

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

ings were just as important as thestained glass and pervasive light. “Weprofess that we must do homage alsothrough the outward ornaments ofsacred vessels,” Suger wrote. “Thus,when—out of my delight in the beautyof the house of God—the loveliness ofthe many-colored gems has called meaway from external cares, and worthymeditation has induced me to reflect,transferring that which is material tothat which is immaterial, on the diversi-ty of the sacred virtues: then it seems tome that I see myself dwelling, as it were,in some strange region of the universewhich neither exists entirely in the slimeof the earth nor entirely in the purity ofHeaven, and that, by the grace of God, Ican be transported from this inferior tothat higher world in an anagogicalmanner.” [Quoted from E. Panofsky,Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed.(Princeton, 1979).]

Louis XI and Private Devotion

When Suger’s nation-building projectwas resumed in the Fifteenth Centuryby the Dauphin of France, later knownas the “Spider King” Louis XI, a newfactor had entered, and this was therise of a merchant middle class and thenotion of the unique role of the indi-vidual. Private devotions, rather thanthe public liturgy, inspired the greatestart.

As the Getty Museum’s elegant vol-ume on The Hours of Simon de Varieexplains, “The book of hours was thecharacteristic private prayer book of thelate Middle Ages, containing standard-ized texts used especially by the laity.” It“contained only material for privatedevotions: its contents did not have to berecited and its standardized texts couldbe used selectively according to personalneed. “The needs in question were thoseshared by the majority of believers in thelate Middle Ages. There were reasonsboth practical and spiritual for individu-als to reckon dates and follow the courseof religious feasts, to review the biblicaltexts that outline Christ’s redemption ofhumankind, to praise and beseech Mary,Christ, or the Holy Spirit (each believedcapable of interceding in essential waysin the lives and fates of individuals), to

pray for the dead or dying, and to askfor forgiveness from sins or for the inter-cessions of saints.”

Often, a book of hours was the firstand only book a person possessed. Thetexts were usually complemented andenhanced by handcrafted decorationand illustration. Never cheap, and oftenvery costly, they could be afforded onlyby a small group, primarily royalty,nobility, and wealthy members of theemerging merchant and bureaucraticclasses.

Fouquet and Louis XI

Historical research on Jean Fouquet’spatron reported in Francois Avril’sessay “Simon de Varie, Patron of theHours,” sheds light on Fouquet’s roleboth in his work on this manuscript andmore broadly. For although he wasroyal painter to Charles VII, yet it seemsplausible to associate Fouquet’sadvanced art with Louis XI, the sonwho schemed against his foolish andwicked father in order to rebuild theFrench nation-state. The checkered

careers of the deVarie brothers, thepatron Simon andSimon’s brotherGuillaume—both ofwhom became lead-ing financial andcommercial advisersand agents to Louisin Languedoc athis accession topower—show hownumbers of individ-uals involved inCharles VII’s courtwere actually work-ing for the Dauphin.

Fouquet hadspent key years ofhis youth in Flo-rence and Rome,from the end of theCouncil of Florencein 1444 through partof the pontificate ofNicholas V, the firstreal RenaissancePope (1447-55). Hewas surely in theorbit of Fra Angeli-

co while in Florence, and he broughtback to France his own, highly originalvariants on the Florentine style, includ-ing his own spherical perspective and apersonal technique of using gold, previ-ously employed by artists to create a flat,decorative effect, as a means of generat-ing spatial illusion.

Like all the best northern Europeanand Italian artists of the era of the Coun-cil of Florence that unified the Greekand Latin churches, Fouquet “western-ized” typical motifs of Byzantine iconpainting. The highly original “Madonnaand Child” from The Hague portion ofthe Varie Hours, in which the Child’shead is covered by part of the Virgin’srobe, is just such an adaptation of aByzantine model [SEE inside back cover,this issue]. And to the Getty portionbelong two dazzling Fouquet pages, thefirst “new” Fouquet works discoveredsince the beginning of this century: aseated Virgin and Child, and the facingpage portrait of Simon de Varie kneelingwith his family coat of arms.

—Nora Hamerman

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J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu

Jean Fouquet, “Simon de Varie in Prayer,” from the “Hours ofSimon de Varie.”