Die illuminierten Handschriften französischer Herkunft in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek

The volume of the scientific catalogues of the Bavarian State Library does not only include all the manuscripts from the 10th to the end of the 14th century with French illumination, but Ulrike Bauer-Eberhardt also describes in it all the English and Spanish decorated manuscripts kept in Munich. According to the art historical practice the 294 corresponding manuscripts are classified with stylistic arguments and attributed to different regions or cities and to different periods. So at last for certain parts of France – as the North or especially Paris – there can be given a representative portrait of certain workshops for book illumination or even of individual artists, who were active in certain periods and had decorated many manuscripts, today kept all over the world. In this context may be considered the so-called Channel Style, practiced with nearly identical elements of decoration about 1200 in southern England and northern France as well, as famous anonymous workshops – for example the Du Prat Atelier (cat. 30), the Gautier Lebaube Atelier (cat. 97), the Johannes Grusch Atelier (cat. 97, cat. 144), the Aurifaber-workshop (cat. 118, cat. 149, cat. 150, cat. 156, cat. 167, cat. 189) or the Jonathan Alexander Master (cat. 204) – or even several miniaturists identified by name, as Richard de Montbaston (cat. 252, cat. 255, cat. 257) and the Master Fauvel (cat. 255). But the volume includes also extraordinary manuscripts from England, such as the famous Golden Munich Psalter, illuminated in the first third of the 13th century in Oxford. Since great part of the manuscripts in Munich formerly belonged to Bavarian monasteries and they have been transferred to the Bavarian State Library during the secularization, also the majority of the exemplars illuminated in France offer sacral subjects. Worth mentioning in this context are the 35 tiny bibles created during the 13th century in France, with delicate parchment from unborn calfs, written in elegant textualis and often illuminated exquisitely with a great number of miniatures. Those portable manuscripts used for private devotion present the most progressive form of bibles in the Occident in those days, and of course they were part of the standard equipment in the different Bavarian monasteries.