8 - The Aeneid in the 1530s: Reading with the Limoges Enamels

Summary

In the early 1530s an unknown artist in Limoges, working in a style similar to that of Jean Pénicaud, produced a series of at least eighty-two enamels illustrating episodes from the Aeneid, a beautiful set of images whose value is also the insight they provide into what the Aeneid meant to contemporary French readers. The enamels illustrate scenes drawn from all books except the last three (10–12), suggesting that production was interrupted for a reason so far lost to history. The series is unique for the period in its extensive and methodical reproduction of episodes from a single work of literature. Approximately uniform in size (on average 22cm × 20cm), the enamel plaques are richly and deeply coloured, with intense blues, greens and brownish purples predominating, complemented here and there by occasional flourishes of gold, such as for depicting stars in the sky. Although parts of the series can be viewed relatively easily at the Louvre and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the rest of the enamels are spread out among various public and private collections around the world. Until a full catalogue with reproductions is available, any interpretation (including this one) is necessarily partial and imperfect. In what follows, I should nevertheless like to adopt a point made by Christopher Baswell in respect of Virgil manuscripts and to see the Limoges enamels as “potential sites of contest between conflicting readerly groups, preoccupations and demands.”