Art in Pursuit
MULLARKEY, MAUREEN
Art in Pursuit Hounds, nature, God, and medieval man. BY MAUREEN MULLARKEY ‘Illuminating the Medieval Hunt” at New York’s Morgan Library is a seductive window into the difference in...
...Stamina and resourcefulness were best acquired early because “a craft requires all a man’s life ere he be perfect thereof ” and it is never too soon to learn to dread failure...
...The loveliness of the manuscript holds lessons of its own...
...pily on hand to be leafed through), the Phoebus manuscript is uniquely accessible just now...
...The medieval imagination transformed aesthetic pleasure into a mystical joie de vivre, inextricable from contemplation of the Good, beauty’s transcendent source...
...Hunting hawks, like dogs, were deemed capable of fealty, and their self-sacrifi cial acts of loyalty, real or mythical, are sweetly illustrated...
...The author himself dropped dead at the end of a gruel ing bear hunt...
...Like the fabric of medieval life itself, the rubrics of the hunt were intertwined with the liturgical calendar, the cult of the saints, and codes of courtesy...
...In what is almost a canticle to hounds, the author describes them in terms befi tting the ideal Christian knight...
...The charm of the exhibition is incidental to what it portrays of a chivalric culture that spread across Europe, even to Syria and the edge of the Arabian desert...
...it kept men in trim for battle...
...Art for art’s sake would have been an unintelligible creed...
...The Morgan Library’s copy was most likely commissioned by Philip’s son from a Parisian workshop around 1407...
...Running with hounds was the favorite and most respected form of the chase...
...Among these last was warcraft, the agent and protector of statecraft...
...The extended display closes with a 17th-century Mughal scene of a female hunter holding a gun, the weapon that fi nished hunting as Phoebus knew it...
...Phoebus’s sporting dismissal of them, portrayed close to their burrows, is analogous to the chivalric refusal to kill an unarmed man...
...A man of arms, he was also a talented naturalist whose expertise in the hunt was sharpened by expeditions north during lulls in the Hundred Years War...
...Since women practiced falconry, hawking was preferred for May, Mary’s month...
...Disbound for conservation reasons and the preparation of a facsimile (hapMaureen Mullarkey writes about art for the New York Sun, the New Criterion, and other publications...
...The feudal epoch was one of wide accomplishment, ranging from technological advance to the arts of governance...
...Feudal nobles were landed rulers but, above all, they were mounted warriors: cavalry...
...An exhibition that breathes life into even a single part of it is a welcome event...
...So are the protocols for ritual dismembering of the stag...
...The great stag was strong, swift, cunning, and bellicose (“wonderfully perilous”)—hence, the worthiest prey...
...Surnamed Phoebus— Latin for Apollo—in tribute to his manly beauty, Gaston III, count of Foix and viscount of B?arn in southwestern France, was one of the most powerful French feudal nobles...
...It was a bestseller in its day, prompting multiple copies, and translated into various languages, fi rst in commissioned manuscripts, later in printed editions...
...So did the size of hoofprints and the quality of his bellow...
...No attention to their well-being was too minor: They appear in almost every miniature, on the chase or in the hands of groomsmen who examine their ears, trim and bathe their paws, tend their wounds...
...The blood sport of princes, hunting was proxy for the arts of war...
...Otters, foxes, rabbits, hinds, wild goats, reindeer, bears, wild cats (“their falseness and malice are well known”), and the hated wolf are treated in turn...
...Badgers, on the other hand, were not fair game...
...Theodore Roosevelt, writing from the White House, introduced a 1909 reprint with praise for the great medieval lords as “mighty men with their hands and terrible in battle” as well as cultivated statesmen...
...It banished idleness, thereby causing men “to eschew the seven deadly sins...
...The hand of the calligrapher is as subtle and measured as the painter’s: Undulating, chiseled script, no less beautiful than the coloration, knits text and imagery together...
...He dedicated his own manual to his friend and fellow warrior-huntsman Philip the Bold, who fi rst saw battle at age 14...
...the elaborate techniques of hunting with dogs...
...Roosevelt reserved his highest admiration for the roving hunter who penetrates the wilderness with simple equipment and shifts for himself...
...A tree “frayed well high” indicated a tall, hale specimen...
...A modern analogy might be George S. Patton’s 1941 Louisiana maneuvers, in which his 2nd Armored Division attacked, not an enraged boar, but Shreveport...
...One miniature shows scouts returning to camp with droppings, another indicator of size, displayed for noble inspection...
...the nature of dogs and their care...
...He pursued game across Sweden, Norway, and East Prussia, and read every available manual on hunting...
...Boar hunting began on Michaelmas, when the animal was fl eshiest...
...Phoebus describes the habits of wild animals...
...The polar opposite of the stag, the boar was the original b?te noire, a menacing symbol of evil and a fi erce, dangerous opponent...
...Phoebus, whose kennel numbered 1,600 dogs, lavishes attention on “the best knowing of any beast God ever made...
...Stag hunting began and ended on two different feast days of the Holy Cross...
...BY MAUREEN MULLARKEY ‘Illuminating the Medieval Hunt” at New York’s Morgan Library is a seductive window into the difference in temper between the Middle Ages and our own, more complacent, era...
...Phoebus thought seven or eight a proper age to begin a boy’s training in the hunt...
...He begins by invoking the Trinity and the Mother of God before praising the virtues of the chase...
...A pair of boars is depicted copulating, the artist’s way of indicating their base nature...
...Here are more than antiquarian objets d’art...
...besides being inedible, they slept too much and had few defenses...
...The Phoebus manuscript ends, as it began, with prayer...
...Prowess in close-quarters combat, an occupational requirement, found ritualized expression in the hunt...
...The Phoebus manuscript is a jewel of medieval illumination...
...At the same time, he lamented the eventual deterioration of the hunt into destructive obsession and a riskless “parody of the stern hunting life...
...The architecture of each vellum page has a harmonic integrity that testifi es to the vitality of medieval aesthetic sensibility...
...Not always accurately, since Parisian illuminators did not get into the woods much...
...and the less laudable ones of hunting with traps, snares, and crossbow...
...A postscript: Edward of Norwich, Duke of York, later to die at Agincourt, translated Phoebus’s manual into English, under the title The Master of Game...
...Starting in the wild before daybreak, and lasting until prey was run to exhaustion, the hunt was a rigorous campaign...
...Two dozen additional rare volumes on the hunt, dating from the 11th century, to later Persian and Mughal works, complete the display...
...Physical and moral courage were of a piece...
...In between, around Mary Magdalene Day, when deer polished their antlers on trees, was the optimal time for tracking them...
...On exhibit are some 50 illuminated pages from the Morgan’s manuscript by Gaston Phoebus (133191), Le Livre de la chasse, the most famous hunting manual of all time...
...The strategies and risks in selecting prey, tracking, ambushing, and killing it are described with precision and illustrated with verve...
...Le Livre de la chasse is an exquisite emblem of chivalric culture, one that marked Western civilization with unique characteristics the future will be lucky to sustain...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 36
