Bicentenary at Tournai: Collection of the Great Seminary (1808-2008)

As places of learning, intended for the formation of clergy, Great Seminaries were also known for their cultural heritage. That is, if history had not been too unkind. And in the case of Tournai, it hasn’t.

On 10 November 2008 the Great Seminary is celebrating its 200^th year in the same premises since 1808. It was founded thanks to an obstinate bishop, François-Joseph Hirn, originally from Alsace, and with a little help of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The premises had then seen at least 3 previous owners, and 2 centuries of construction and restauration. At the end of the 16^th century, the Jesuits organised a college and a noviciate in them. When the order was abolished in 1773, the buildings remained empty. A few years later, the canons regular were the new owners, until they had to vacate in 1794 and give way to an administrative office under the French republic.

The Great Seminary today can take pride in a library of more than 100,000 volumes, comprising medieval manuscripts and archival documents, incunables, etchings, and many precious bindings. And one of its abbots in the 20^th century took care to establish a small museum for several artefacts, including oil panels.

The collections mostly have religious provenances. A few go back to the Jesuits and the canons regulars, but most were the scattered holdings of other abolished religious institutions in and around Tournai. For these artefacts, the foundation of the Great Seminary, not long after the abolishment of religious orders in general, proved fortuitous.

The bicentenary has occasioned a new and richly illustrated monograph about the building, the garden, and its collections, which have also been catalogued with text and image. The project has benefited from a close collaboration with the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage at Brussels (IRPA-KIK).

The notes on manuscript, etchings, bindings and rare book holdings have been authored by P. Bogaert osb, Annie De Coster, J.-B. Lebigue, J. Leclercq-Marx, E. Livens, L.Reynhout, F. Tixier, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe, Renaud Adam, Ph. Desmette, and A. Delvingt.

Details: Séminaire de Tournai, Rue des Jésuites 28, 7500 Tournai (Doornik). Press release to be obtained by Monique Maillard-Luypaert, curator of the Great Seminary Library. On 15 and 16 November 2008, Mrs Maillard will be present at a cultural event called Tournai La Page (Halle aux draps, Tournai).

Book: Monique Maillard-Luypaert, et al., Séminaire de Tournai. Histoire – Bâtiments – Collections. Leuven, Peeters Publishers, 2008 (forthcoming). 360 p. 251 illustrations. ISBN 978-904292169-6. Price: 75 €.

Photo credit: M.Maillard-Luypaert

Exhibition "Florent Rousseau" at Bibliotheca Wittockiana (24 May-30 August, 2008)

The Bibliotheca Wittockiana grew out of the private collection of bookbindings of Belgian bibliophile and collector Michel Wittock. It was turned into a museum, devoted to the binding, with opening hours, at one of Brussels' most leafy boroughs.
The best source about this collection is the Festschrift Bibliophilies et reliures. Mélanges offerts à Michel Wittock (2006) in the museum's own Studia series (no.6). 520 pages, cloth. No ISBN. Inquiries can be made at the museum.

Wittock gathered a collection of rare books and bindings, but the contemporary binding, increasingly a focus in his collecting, has always been a particular focus for exhibitions. Here is Florent Rousseau. Reliures de creation 1998-2008. It opened May 24, 2008, and runs until August 30, 2008. A selection of bindings from French bookbinder Florent Rousseau’s production are shown.

In the second half of 2007, the periodical of the Société royale des bibliophiles et iconophiles de Belgique (SRBIB) -this is the Royal Society of Bibliophiles and Iconophiles of Belgium, based at Brussels- published an article of Florent Rousseau's, actually a talk that he had delivered at Tournai in 2006: Etat actuel de la reliure en France. In Le livre et l'estampe (2007), vol.53 no.168, p.127-159 (BE ISSN 0024-533 x). It's an excellent article: clear, informative.

Florent Rousseau founded AIR neuf, Association internationale de relieurs, in 1995, and today he initiated a new group called APPAR, Association pour la promotion des arts de la reliure. With APPAR, he responds to a rift that he detected between amateur bookbinders and professional ones, on the one hand, and to attitudes pro or counter the classical French heritage of bookbinding on the other.

Starting with Marius Michel at the cusp of the 20th century, Rousseau gives an overview, in which all the famous bookbinders from a golden age of French bookbinding are mentioned. The period of Decorative Arts yielded an intense collaboration between famous French authors, artists, bookbinders, and their collectors. Most of the bookbinders then were like fashion designers: no craftsmen, but responsible for the concept. One of them, Paul Bonet, was both: fashion and binding designer. Collaboration with separate doreurs or gilders was customary.

Ironically, collectors are deemed responsible by Rousseau for a turn away by bookbinders from a tradition that had become somewhat stilted. Collectors had demanded too much of a good thing, a binding with sleeves and etui that continued to be influenced by the same arts, and that had become "purely academical".

There was a tendency among the binders who did ply their craft in person, starting from the late 1970s, to reject tradition altogether. New currents came into existence with no link to tradition. With AIR neuf, Rousseau wanted to provide a typology for the innovations. Collectors meanwhile did not place orders with just any adept of radical change. But exploration of the binding by the artisan bookbinder did yield some technical riches for the craft.

Structure became the magic word. Binders showed the construction of the book, no back, no carton, no more guards. No gilding. No hierarchy as to types of leather, and a turn to less expensive kinds of leather. No more sleeves, no étui, but boxes, and use of wood. But little by little, new references to tradition were made, but by artisans adept with paper and decors who were able to improvise, to work with color and contrasts. Rousseau is one of them.

Over time, amateur bookbinders got more limelight than the professional craftsmen, but only because their work rarely is the subject of exhibitions. In APPAR, Rousseau is hoping to unite both. French bookbinding is pretty vibrant these days, and Rousseau is adamant to keep it that way.

Exhibition "The Anatomy of Vanities" (Erasmus' House, Brussels, April 24-July 13, 2008)

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton got published in 1621, and the Erasmus' House in Brussels currently has an exhibition called The Anatomy of Vanities (April 12, 2008-July 13, 2008). Burton's medical treatise and the exhibition have in common a medical subject and an unusual breadth of approach. In the case of the exhibition, we add staggering beauty.

The son of a French luxury goods scion quipped that he sees the best contemporary galleries in each city he visits on business. Why not a pars pro toto at the Erasmushouse with the works of Jan Fabre and Marie-Jo Lafontaine, in rooms that have recently been repainted. Why not the museum's garden with permanent works of art, amongst others Les larmes du ciel by Marie-Jo Lafontaine. With a spoonful of contemporary art, a medicine of memento mori goes down.
This exhibition fits one of the themes that the Erasmushouse under its director Alexandre Vanautgaerden sets out to explore as of 1998: the cabinet of rarities or vanities, which it sees as a predecessor of the museum. The cabinets brought together works or art, natural or exotic fauna and flora, and scientific instruments.

Such cabinets were in vogue after Erasmus' time, but, as gathered from Vanautgaerden's introduction to the catalogue, Erasmus' contemporary Albrecht Dürer started his Wunderkammer with elements from a trip to.. the Netherlands. Cabinet elements are present here, organised around the concept of idleness or vanity.

In Erasmus' days, death was more pressing than in ours, the reminder more common. Erasmus, who was somewhat sickly, wore a ring with the Latin inscription 'concedo nulli', 'I yield to no one', a direct reference to man's natural fate from the standpoint of a personified Death.

The take on death in this exhibition is to understand it with a certain jubilation, by lingering to take in past and present moments of beauty, and by seeing the attempts to fixate or represent life in the name of curiosity.

Bright green parrots from the Museum of Natural History at Tournai are laid around a skull in garland fashion. The skeleton and the snake are omnipresent in delicately wooden or ivory sculpted figurines or heads. There are plant arrangements by a Brussels florist, leaving room for ongoing microscopic processes in glasshouse conditions. and there's the human desire to push the limits of technique in exquisite mechanically turned objects of ivory and wood.

In an essay from the catalogue, Jean-Marc Mandosio traces man's preoccuption with the anatomical model through time. The models of women, the Venuses or Evas, as he explains, were always represented full-bodied, with skin, unlike the Adams. Their shape was an ideal, and in stark contrast with the entrails and organs you could still remove.

The collector who gave these strange and beautiful objects on loan, acutely phrases how despite our ability to prolong life, and to taunt it with the most fantastical creations, clinging to it will be as vain as in the time of Erasmus. If to the vistor this comes as too great a shock, there are always the editions of Erasmus on view on the second floor, or a moment's pause in the philosophical garden of the museum to regain spirits.

As a visitor, you take these beautiful objects home in the shape of the catalogue: Anatomie des vanités. Anatomie der ijdelheden. Sous la direction de - onder leiding van Alexandre Vanautgaerden. Bilingual catalogue French-Dutch. Le Cabinet d'Erasme VI (2008). 93 p. color ills. ISBN 978-2-930414-22-5. Exhibition until July 13, 2008. Erasmus House and garden, open every day except Mondays (Photos: museum website).
PS: Belgium is a country of collectors-the exhibition Hout in boeken (see our March 10, 2008 post) featured another collector's 17th C set of thinly turned woodcups -a marvel. See Charles Indekeu's article "Ornamentdraaiwerk. Machinekunst voor vorsten" (p. 315-325) in the study Hout in boeken (see our April 24, 2008 post) as a complement to the catalogue of the Erasmushouse exhibition.