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were associated with aspects of characters depicted, such as wealth, power, or virtue or lack thereof.
A rare surviving example of written directions to artists and of the images based on those written directions offers insight into the communal nature of this voaculary of dress. In 1417 the hu- manist Jean Lebegue [Le Begue] wrote directions in French (Ox- ford, Bodleian Library, D’Orville Ms. 141, fols. 42v-55v) on how to illustrate Sallust’s Roman histories of the Catiline conspiracy and the Jugurthine wars, and around 1420 he acted as libraire for the production of the illuminated manuscript (Geneva, Biblio- theque de Geneve, Ms. lat. 54) that followed them. Comparison with earlier manuscripts reveals that the images made for Lebegue in 1420 drew on a visual rhetoric that was well established before he wrote his directions; Lebegue tapped into this rhetoric when he described the miniatures he wanted, and the artists employed it when they visualized them (Anne D. Hedeman, “Presenting the Past: Visual Translation in Thirteenth- to Fifteenth-Century France,” p. 78).
Much of this information regarding French vernacular historical illumi- nated manuscripts is adapted from an extraordinary volume published in December 2010 by Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman entitled Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500, the splen- didly designed, illustrated and produced catalogue for an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Besides the wonderful manuscripts, a fascinating aspect of the exhibition was the inclusion of non-book objects which contain historical iconography such as ivory caskets, tapestries, and even a lady’s purse, showing how interest in the past went beyond the book in the Middle Ages, perhaps a bit like it does today. The catalogue, a richly illustrated study of both manuscript book illustration and manuscript book history, combined historical interpretation with sophisticated curation, and one could not ask for a more exquisite catalogue as a physical object. When we think of substituting digital books for physical books here is an excellent
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