Artworks
This luxurious manuscript was produced especially for the wedding of Guyonne de Beauvau and René de Laval in 1478. The text of the Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine was originally written by the Cistercian monk, Guillaume de Digulleville in verse around 1330. Our manuscript uses the prose version of his text, created in 1464 for Jeanne de Laval, Queen of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem. The second text enclosed, is its rare sequel, the Pèlerinage de l’Âme, in the prose version of Jean Galopes. Both texts together in their respective versions can only be found in one other manuscript.
In a dream the author, Guillaume de Digulleville, sees in a mirror the besieged city of Jerusalem and decides to undertake the perilous journey to the city of God. Five astonishing half-page illuminations and 91 beautiful miniatures tell the story of his treacherous travels full of temptation and peril to his immortal soul. He encounters grotesque personifications of vices and sins among them the six-armed Avarice or Sloth embodied as a temptress.
The manuscript’s illustration was painted by a workshop whose style recalls Parisian illumination rather than that of Angers. Figures are generally robust and well-modelled. Powerful hatchings in hues of the primary colours or in liquid gold mould the draperies. The illuminators succeed impressively in depicting the evil and disfigured faces of the allegories, whose appearance often tends towards the monstrous. For example, the gruesome depiction of Avarice in the title page to Book 3 (f. 99v), who sticks out her tongue with deep furrows carving her cheeks. Emotions are also depicted with immediacy and masterfully, as for example on f. 69r, where the Pilgrim weeps, or on 151v, where he realises with horror that Death will soon take him away.
Ingeniously, the texts and its lavish decoration intertwine religious ideals and notions of entertainment, creating a literary sensation. Charles V owned at least five copies of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, the Duke of Berry had three copies in the vernacular and one in Latin, and Philip the Bold owned two. The Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine promotes the popular medieval theme of the homo viator, the travelling man – personified by a Christian Pilgrim – and spins it into an epic theological quest to the heavenly Jerusalem, laced with physical and spiritual challenges and existential moral choices.