On an Anjou Bible, book surgeons and funding

Our cultural heritage is a commodity, one that draws researchers and tourists from abroad to our country. A source of pride, admiration and, come on, let's not be coy, envy. It is our country's duty to see economic value in that, a ruse to foster technical expertise long-term. Not only to keep know-how in our country to preserve this heritage in the most appropriate of ways, but perhaps also to offer expertise internationally as a viable enterprise.

This was more or less Professor Jan van der Stock's plea in 2005, at the inauguration of the "Van der Weyden Chair - Paul and Dora Janssen" for research on illumination. Jan Van der Stock is an able mix of the professorial with the entrepreneurial -to our knowledge, he's the only professor ever to have realised a named chair in Humanities, at least at Leuven.

We are very pleased that civic duty did not fall on deaf ears at the Inbev-Baillet Latour Fund. Recently, this Fund has awarded 80.000 € to a restauration project on the "Anjou-Bible", a mid 14th-century precious manuscript, kept in a vault at Leuven. In matters of culture, the Fund has chosen restoration projects as its focus.

Today's issue of Campuskrant, the magazine of the University of Leuven (KUL) (June 11, 2008, 19th year, no.10), opens with the story. We see color pictures of the richly illuminated manuscript, and of the conservator, Lieve Watteeuw, beaming.

The manuscript, we gather, was executed at the behest of Robert I of Anjou. In the early 16th century, the manuscript came to the Arras College of the university at Leuven, by the doings of the bishop of Arras. And today it still belongs to the university, as it is preserved at the Maurits Sabbe Library (Theology Department).

The conservation project is a co-production between llluminare at Leuven and KIK-IRPA, the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage, based at Brussels.
For Illuminare, Jan Van der Stock will supervise, and Lieve Watteeuw will execute.

The manuscript will receive a new conservation binding. All folia will be taken out of the old early 20th-century binding that was too tight and detrimental to the manuscript. The folia will be cleaned, and the color layers will be stabilized. Here are a few photos of damage to miniatures on Illuminare's website. The folia will also be digitized. Leuven plans to put the manuscripts on show in 2011 in the newly planned city museum "M" (Museum Leuven), where visitors will be able to leaf through the digital copy.

Lieve Watteeuw is one of these conservation specialists, whose importance can hardly be overrated, especially when they happen to be rather few. A "book surgeon", at home with parchment, paper, illumination and leather bindings, and it was excellent news that she received public accolade on February 21, 2005 in the shape of the Flemish Community Prize 2004 in the category of Cultural Heritage.

We planned to dwell somewhat longer on Watteeuw's doctoral thesis at Leuven (see June 6, 2008 post, "Hora est"), entitled "The Touch of Chronos: Caring for the Medieval Manuscript (1731-1937)." Our source is the recently promoted researcher's own summary.

Watteeuw undertakes investigation of how the material aspect of the medieval manuscript has been treated and altered throughout the ages, and how it was been viewed by art and library historians, and conservators-restorators. Apparently, it wasn't until recently that the link between the material appearance of a codex and its contents has been taken into account, which explains "complete acts of destruction", for instance when codices were rebound, and their old covers done away with, over a period of the last two hundred years.

Watteeuw's thesis has three parts. Part I offers a history of the preservation and restauration practices of manuscripts, bindings and miniatures, from the Middle Agens until the 19th century. Watteeuw is using traces of book care in archival material, the inventories of the Burgundian Ducal Collection at the Royal Library at Brussels, and the Chapter of the Church of Our Lady at Antwerp. This history touches upon a historiography of mentalities, to explain why certain practices were favored in certain epochs.

In no period has the medieval manuscript suffered so much as at the hands of the 19th century antiquarians, who nevertheless rekindled an interest in the Middle Ages. Part II explores the heritage conservation practices or that era. Watteeuw also develops a methodology for the intervention on book and manuscripts for this day. She does this at the hand of one single, very famous corpus at the Royal Library of Belgium: the 280 surviving manuscripts, out of an original 900, once in the library or librije of the Court of Burgundy. Watteeuw investigates the fate of this collection from 1731 onwards, when the Burgundian Library fell into desuetude, until 1937, marking the end of the career of Charles Weckesser as bookbinder in the service of the Royal Library.

In Part III, entitled "Fight Against Chronos," Watteeuw takes the material fate of four medieval manuscripts as a starting point to gather the contrasting responses of bookbinders, restorators, antiquarians, archivists and librarians to them. Both the exterior book cover as the interior illumination are considered. Watteeuw also discusses what present-day manipulations such as exhibiting and making photographic facsimiles do to such artefacts.

Jan Van der Stock is quoted in today's Campuskrant as saying that the history of how the Anjou-Bible actually originated at a French court, reads like a thriller. We have the feeling that in Watteeuw's PhD material sits a book that does too.