The capture of the Venetian banners by the armies of Louis XII, miniature on a leaf from an illuminated copy of Raoul Bollart, De la victoire et du triomphe du roi de France Louis XII contre les Vénitiens, in Latin verse, on vellum [Northern France (Paris or Rouen), c.1509]

single leaf, 215mm. by 154mm., with a large rectangular miniature within a gold frame, 80mm. by 90mm., with two French military commanders in golden armour, standing before their armies on the field of victory, holding a sword and the Venetian banners with a winged lion seated on a blue cushion and a silver unicorn, one small initial in liquid gold on pale brown grounds, and 13 lines of text in an ornate lettre bâtarde with elaborate penstrokes extending from ‘a’s into the margin, reference notes in margin in a fine humanist hand, 19 lines of text, another initial and eighteenth-century folio number ‘9’ on verso, very slight staining along upper edge, some remnants of brown tape from previous framing, else excellent condition, in card mount

This is the key miniature from a dispersed sister manuscript to Geneva, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, ms. lat.97 (closely corresponding to fol.8v there: Aubert, Notices sur les Manuscrits Petau, 1911, pp.49-50 and L’enluminure de Charlemagne à François Ier, 1976, no.65; reproduced by R.W. Scheller in Simiolus 27, 1999, p.218, and in the recent facsimile of the manuscript on the e-codices website).

Raoul Bollart, lord of Champceuil (Seine-et-Oise, near Corbie), composed his panegyric of Louis XII shortly after the Battle of Agnadello, fought in 1509 between the French armies and the forces of Venice. The Venetians met a portion of the French army under the command of Charles II d’Amboise at the village of Agnadello and while engaged in fighting them, were surrounded by the main French forces, and slaughtered; with 4000 Venetians being killed in three hours. Louis seized the whole of Lombardy, and Machiavelli noted of the battle that in a single day the Venetians “lost what it had taken them eight hundred years’ effort to conquer”. Bollart was probably present, and thus his text and these images may be an eye-witness record of Louis’ Italian campaigns.

The artist is an accomplished contemporary of Jean Pichore (fl. 1502-21: cf. L’Art du manuscrit de la Renaissance en France, 2001, no.3), and the figures share that artist's rosy complexions and splashs of red to highlight their lips. It is clear that this and the Geneva manuscript were prepared by the same workshop. One copy was certainly destined for the royal library, and other copies perhaps for Bollart himself or other commanders of the forces. The Geneva manuscript has no royal arms, and so these leaves here may well be from the royal presentation copy.