File:Roman de la Rose (IA 1945 65 3).pdf

Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, 1945‑65‑3. Paris, France, Between 1450 and 1480. This lavish manuscript copy of the Roman de la Rose features a remarkably dense iconographic cycle, containing seventy-five ornate miniatures. It was illuminated in the second half of the fifteenth century in the workshop of Maitre Francois, and the miniatures are the work of at least two artists. The program of illustrations favors the text of Guillaume de Lorris, which has forty-four illustrations versus thirty-one for the much longer text of Jean de Meun, both with an emphasis on portraiture. The text of the Roman de Ia Rose, written in Old French, is originally the work of two authors. It was begun by Guillaume de Lorris circa 1225-30 and comprises around three thousand lines. Jean de Meun, (also spelled Meung and Mehun; died 1305), a well-known scholar and translator, added an additional saga to the original poem comprised of around seventeen thousand lines sometime before 1278. The text of the Roman de la Rose in the manuscript in the Philadelphia Museum of Art also incorporates later additions and moralizing revisions made in several stages by Gui de Mori, a Picard cleric, as well as over two-hundred marginal inscriptions and commentaries on the Rose text made by a single, anonymous sixteenth-century hand. In addition to both parts of the Rose, the manuscript also contains other works attributed to, or thought to have been, the work of Jean de Meun, including the Testament of Jean de Meun (fols. 151-177v), a poem once attributed to him, provisionally entitled Le Songe (The Dream, fols. 178r-179v), followed by a text entitled, Les Sept Articles de la Foi de Jean Chapuis (The Seven Articles of Faith of Jean Chapuis) (fols. 180r-193r), ending with the Codicille of Jean de Meun (fols. 193r-200v), his petit Codicille (fols. 200v-201v), and Miserere Defunctorum (fols. 201v-202v).