Antiquity to Modernity in Two Thousand Portraits, 1623
This exceptional undertaking in print and imaginative portraiture promises its reader a sweeping history of Europe from classical and biblical antiquity up to the present moment. While predictably encompassing kings and queens, it also intriguingly celebrates Hebrew patriarchs alongside pagan prophetesses before proceeding to ancient emperors, popes, and other crowned heads of Europe in twenty sections:
1. Hebrew Patriarchs (112 portraits in 9 leaves)
2. Sibyls (12 in 8)
3. Pagan Gods & Goddesses (59 in 8)
4. Persian Kings & Queens (52 in 10)
5. Roman Emperors (295 in 23)
6. Rulers of Constantinople (76 in 9)
7. Popes (245 in 9)
8. French Kings & Queens (150 in 18)
9. Spanish Kings & Queens (185 in 22)
10. English Kings (137 in 9)
11. Polish Kings (44 in 5)
12. Rulers of Naples (29 in 13)
13. Rulers of Savoy (57 in 8)
14. Venetian Doges (90 in 10)
15. Dukes of Brabant (94 in 11)
16. Masters of Knights of St. John (53 in 9)
17. Chancellors of France (95 in 10)
18. Famous Frenchmen (144 in 11)
19. Jurists of Roman Law (66 in 8)
20. Latin & Neo-Latin Poets (96 in 8)
It does so as an elaborately formed chronologie collée—a curious and bespoke “scrapbook” genre of book production almost unique to late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century France that involves sequences of engraved portraits and accompanying letterpress texts individually cut and mounted on heavy blank sheets. This genre of visual prosopography began with the emergence of decorative late sixteenth-century folios of French royal portraiture issued by publisher and engraver Jean Le Clerc, whose innovative gallery of famous Frenchmen since 1500 (section 18 in the present volume), was cut by Léonard Gaultier and helped to pioneer the market for “glued histories.” Over the ensuing decades, further suites in the other categories represented in the Hopkins Chronologie developed to satisfy popular demand. Print sellers were prohibited by law from directly competing with stationers active in the book trade. They may have cooperated, however, in the production and sale of the uncut engraved sheets and separately issued letterpress text broadsides, which could be purchased separately, then cut and pasted into an album as intended.
Drawing on portraits from ancient coins, medals, statues, and paintings, as well as architectural and manuscript sources, the market for these albums may well have been wide. Artists might have thought them interesting as visual source materials, or they may have been desirable artifacts for book collectors, seen as ready reference material for historians and tutors or, for wealthy parents, as an inviting visual entrée into a “Who’s Who” personality-driven understanding of history both ancient and modern.
Among the most intriguing and revealing of these sections is that dedicated to non-royal French personages, which in effect forms a kind of “canon” of prominent latter-day philosophers, jurists, medical doctors, and literary figures of the early modern period. There one encounters a curious ménage of figures, many now quite obscure, others immediately identifiable to latter-day audiences but whose letterpress biographies do not always remember them for the achievements that have carried their fame to the present day. The entry for François Rabelais (#99 of the 144 in section 18), never names his great satirical magnum opus, Gargantua and Pantagruel, only stating in passing that Rabelais was “facetious and mocking” and emphasizing his prominence as a physician and editor of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms (1532).
The Hopkins Chronologie was clearly assembled with care and at considerable expense, as is suggested by the elaborate engraved title-page cartouche by the artist Matthäus Merian, heightened in gold and bistre and surrounding the work’s handwritten title. The monumental battlefield res gestae iconography of the dramatically rendered scene is an admixture of weaponry, armor, and slaves redolent both of classicizing antiquity and of neoclassical modernity. Each of the twenty separate letterpress series titles appears in one of five highly decorative etched frames (three signed by Nicolas de Mathonière). The album is bound in a fine contemporary gilt-ruled red morocco à la Du Seuil, panels alike with three triple-rule frames, the central with a vase and bouquet in each corner, and the central arms of the Prieuré Royal de Sainte-Madeleine de Rouen, an order of Augustinian canonesses whose priory was largely destroyed by fire in 1624, just one year after the Hopkins Chronologie is believed to have been assembled.
It is also somewhat surprising that the most visually prominent section is that devoted to the twelve ancient Roman sibyls. That section opens with an Epistle to the Reader, unique in the volume, which explains the history and mythology surrounding the ancient oracles before presenting them in unusually large-scale portraits three times the size of those in other sections. Indeed, each sibyl occupies an entire page, and their visages are augmented with accompanying laudatory texts in both prose and verse, distinguishing them in a distinctive visual and literary context unlike any granted to temporal rulers. The specific design of the sibyls sequence clearly derives from the recently published work of the French engraver of Flemish origin Thomas de Leu (1560–1612) made after engravings by the Flemish engraver Crispin de Passe the Elder (1564–1637), which were published in Paris by Jean Le Clerc as XII Sibyllae, ordine, inscriptione & forma elegantiori quam antehac umquam. Ex antiquiss. Monumentis restutae & propriis oraculis redditae (1617). The Sheridan Libraries recently acquired a curious oblong manuscript copy of this work as well, combining scenes from Genesis and of the twelve Old Testament patriarchs with de Leu’s sibyls. The Hopkins Chronologie, however, offers six-line verse stanzas in the French vernacular that describe the particular attributes of each sibyl, whereas de Leu’s engravings offer these only as four-line Latin stanzas.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Henk Jan de Jonge, “The Sibyls in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, or Ficino, Castellio and ‘The Ancient Theology,’” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 78:1 (2016), 7–21; Edouard Pommier, Théories du portrait: de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Gallimard, 1998); C. Pollet, “Les gravures d’Etienne Delaune,” PhD diss., University of Strasbourg, 1995; XII Sibyllae, ordine, inscriptione & forma elegantiori (Paris, 1617), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek,http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11348914-7
