Master of the Rouen Échevinage (active c. 1460–85)
TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR, cut from a manuscript [Rouen, 3rd quarter 15th century]
An unusual and historically significant depiction of the recently-crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III; a miniature by the Master of the Rouen Échevinage, the leading Rouen illuminator of the third quarter of the fifteenth century.

The illuminator is the Master of the Rouen Échevinage (also known as the Master of the Geneva Latini), named for the splendid manuscripts he painted for the Bibliothèque des Echevins in Rouen, the public library assembled by the aldermen of the city. The Master was the dominant illuminator in Rouen after the departure of the English in 1449, when the city became a flourishing centre of manuscript production: his career began c. 1460 and continued into the 1480s (when he illuminated a manuscript to which the present leaf bears stylistic similarity: Pierre de Choisnet, Le Livre des trois âges de l'homme, Paris, BnF, Smith-Lesouëf 70).

The present miniature is very closely related to another depicting the meeting of Paris and Helena with Priam in a manuscript of Jean de Courcy’s Chronique de la Bouquechardière – the prose history of the Greeks and Romans composed by the nobleman, of which around 23 15th-century copies survive – illuminated by the Master in the third quarter of the fifteenth century (London, British Library, Harley 4376, f.90). Our miniature comes from an unrecorded copy of a commentary on Valerius Maximus; the Master is associated with another manuscript of Simon de Hesdin and Nicolas de Gonesse's translation, the Valère Maxime, which also features commentary (Paris, BnF, Fr. 284). Here we see a crowd approaching the walled city, but instead of characters from Greek legend, the figure at the centre of this triumphal procession is the Holy Roman Emperor, identified by the double-headed Reichsadler, or imperial eagle, prominently emblazoned, and the sword and crossed globe he holds. The Reichsadler was the symbol of the Habsburg emperors, first used after the coronation of Frederick III (1415-1493) in 1452: the miniature must relate directly to this significant historical event, which would have taken place only a few years before it was painted. Frederick’s son, Maximilian I, who ruled jointly with him from c. 1483 – and who, incidentally, would trace the Habsburg line back to the Trojans – commissioned a series of monumental woodcut prints in the early 16th century from artists including Albrecht Dürer on the same theme, known as the Triumphs of Maximilian.

242 x 165mm.

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