The Château d'Héverlée, a single leaf from the 'Album de Croÿ', an illuminated manuscript on vellum

provenance

Made for Charles, duke de Croÿ and d'Aschot (1560-1612), somewhere in the period 1596-98; by descent to his nephew and heir, Alexandre d'Arenberg, and thence through that family to Ludmilla d'Arenberg, who married Charles Alfred de Croÿ-Dülmen, and then through that family, to the sale in these rooms, 19 June 2001, part of lot 47.

bibliography

See J. M. Duvosquel, Albums de Croÿ: propriétés des Croÿ, III, Brussels, 1985; the articles by the same author, D. Misonne and P. Culot in Les Albums de Croÿ. Exposition à la Bibliothèque royale Albert Ier, 1979; and the extensive bibliographies there.

text

This leaf is from the earliest of the magnificent albums made for Charles, duke de Croÿ and d'Aschot, as an extremely lavish form of estate register, by the artist Adrien de Montigny. The twenty-two volumes of the albums were produced in the period 1596-1610, and visually surveyed his vast estates: the principality of Chimay (given to him by his parents); the patrimony of the Halluin-Comines dynasty in Flanders (inherited from his mother); the duchy of Aschot, the principality of Porcien, the earldoms of Beaumont and Seninghen, the lordship of Avesnes, Lillers, Quiévrain, Escalibes, Beveren (inherited from his father); and domains in Artois, Picardy, Orchimont and Agimont (through his marriage to Marie de Brimeu), and include 2,500 views. The property depicted here lies in the duchy of Aschot, and thus within the core of his patrimonial estates.

Adrien de Montigny can be traced in a number of documents as a respected member of the artistic community in and around Valenciennes. In 1608 he was one of nine artists who signed the statutes of the Confraternity of St. Luke of painters and illuminators of the town, and he is entered in the records of the parish of St. Nicolas as Adrien "maistre peintre" on his death on 21 October 1615. In the last decades of his life he appears to have worked almost exclusively for the duke, and account documents survive noting large payments to a "painctre de Valenchiennes" in 1596, and more explicitly in 1601 a payment: "A Adrian de Montigny, painctre et illumineur de son Exc., demorant de la ville de Vallenchiennes, le somme de 300 livres à tant moins et à bon compte de 449lbs. qui'il prétendoit par son billet cy rendu pour avoir painct et illuminé tous les villages ...". Owing to the survival of a number of watercolour-sketches of a few estates (Château d'Héverlée among them) bound in with the other estate records, we also know a little of his working methods. Evidently, he spent a great deal of the summer months sketching each estate, and then finished pictures such as this were painted on vellum in the winter months.

illumination

The main central panel is an attractive view of the château from a hill to the west (note the same hill, with a small church, is depicted in great detail in the upper part of the estate map on the verso). It is a detailed and faithful depiction of the château, and the artist's only apparent introduction to the scene is the characteristic framing of the view with a few trees atop the edge of a hill. The majority of the panels in the album adopted this position, overlooking the region from a nearby hill, giving them wide empty skies and large foregrounds, painted in pale and rather bland colours. Into these the artist has introduced detail and movement through the use of strong colour (here various shades of purple) into the clouds in the sky, and numerous small details: the coach and horses emerging in the closest part of the foreground, the door of the coach rolled up in the heat of the day; the three couples strolling around the hedged formal gardens while the two gardeners toil nearby; and the crows that wheel around the spires of the château.  The same technique is carried over onto the estate map on the verso, where within a rather bland scene (which even omits the château itself) the small church on the hilltop, the single white swan on the lake, and the rather grim sight of the gallows and the breaking-wheel (ie. a wheel on which criminals were broken) at the crossroads draw the viewer's eye.

the tulip

The inclusion of naturalistic tulip cuttings in the lower border is quite remarkable. Tulips, while common in the Middle East, were virtually unknown in Western Europe before the second half of the sixteenth century. Carolus Clusius notes in his writings that in 1562 a small parcel of tulip bulbs were sent to a merchant in Antwerp along with other goods from Constantinople, and the merchant having never seen such bulbs before, cooked them and ate them. They did not become fashionable or common until the early decades of the seventeenth century, and before that existed only as curiosities in the gardens of wealthy individuals. As A. Pavord notes that "no tulips appear in the flower-strewn borders of the medieval manuscripts of Europe" (The Tulip, 1999, p.30), the present example may be the only known exception to that rule. Moreover, as there are no apparent models for this in manuscript art, the flowers here must be painted from life, and were perhaps cut from the carefully tended ornamental garden which stands before the château in the miniature on the recto of the present leaf.