Faces and Boars in Charters

Monasterium.net hosts since long a project collecting charters that carry a graphical design richer than usual: “Illuminated Charters“. In the frame of this project, the art historian Gabriele Bartz from ÖAW has collected illuminations in French charters. This is a fertile ground for art historians, as – Gabi notices slightly astonished when opening her own collection – she collected already roughly 1700 examples in her data set mainly from the Archives Nationales and Bibliothèque Nationale de France – and she only recently started an extension of the project to cover also minor archives.

She presented us her findings with examples of decorated initials as “trade marks” of individual issuers. The ambitious Bishop Guillaume aux Blanches-Mains (1135-1202) got his charters written with significant embellishments of the initials. the richness is comparable to the design of contemporary royal charters and not comparable to the charters of his brother Henri le libéral in similar important topics. This interest in decoration is also documented in charters by Charles le Mauvais of Navarre, who engaged strongly in the Hundred Years War and tried to get on the French throne himself. Here – at least for the documents kept in France – the French royal chancellery carried out the decorations. Gabi presented other samples of this stylistic rivalry in the Hundred Year’s War, where on the English side the chancery was also famous for their decorations in royal documents.

The style of the design can even be used to identify hands – and as the artist “Draughtsman of the Ph with the capsules and snails” (better known to the audience as the “artist with the hanging tongue”) is a good example as we can trace him as decorater in charters by different issuers.

Illuminations are even telling stories, when the draftsman for Philippe VI draws the king handing over a charter to the queen in the document, in which he is confirming her dowry in March 1332.

Gabi appreciated her digital research environment. She mentioned as advantages of a digital research environment the possibilities to connect the charters with these shared features in a large collection, to add shared descriptions, to describe the charters with multiple keywords, and to use a taxonomy of keywords – and these latter was further developed in the project by Niklas Tscherne, DiDip’s data manager.

In the presentation, Gabi showed us also documents with diplomatics challenges: a possible forgery attributed to Louis the Pious, but stylistically – including the decoration – close to a royal document by Louis VI in 1127 for the same Paris cathedral. Not only we profited from her presentation, but she could also carry away experienced diplomatists’ advice on the date of a charter that by art historians point of view did not fit to the first hand visual impression. Converting a “secundo” or “octo” into a “ordinatio” opened completely new paths.

All of this covers very well the faces from the title. What about the boars? Art historians are good in zoology, so they can identify lots of animals running, winding, jumping on the letters to make them look better. Here is the boar:

Have a look at Gabi’s collection in Monasterium to see more! We hope that computer vision will help you and her one day to find all of them.

See here for the slides of her presentation – with all the images. And have fun reading Gabriele Bartz’ project blog Carta Franca.

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