CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Nagy, Eszter |
|---|---|
| Title | The Judgment of Paris in Rouen Books of Hours from the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century |
| Summary | The present thesis aims to interpret the unusual representation of the Judgment of Paris in the margin of four books of hours made for the use of Rouen c. 1460–80. In three cases, it accompanies the Penitent David, while in the fourth manuscript it is paired with an image of the Virgin. After examining the myth’s availability in Rouen through a quantitative analysis of its manuscript tradition, and discussing the iconographic development that led to the Judgment’s separation from its narrative context, I turn towards the visual context of these mythological representations in the books of hour themselves. The Bathing Bathsheba, depicted close to the Judgment in two of the manuscripts, suggests that they functioned together as warnings against vanity and the exposition of the female body that has destructive effect on men. Although with opposite connotations, misogynous texts and a group of ivory combs support that the idea of the power of beauty connects the two subjects. Stepping beyond the page, the comparison of the whole pictorial cycle of the books of hours leads to the assumption that their decoration goes back to a lost model, probably created by the Master of the Échevinage, in which the Judgment was inserted in a typological cycle running in the margins. While they seem to be derivative, in some cases even corrupted versions of this hypothetical model, the decoration of the four books of hours, with all of their peculiarities, fits into a tendency to diversify the standard iconography of books of hours. |
| Supervisor | Szakács, Béla Zsolt |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/nagy_eszter_02.pdf |
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