Le commanditaire du Saint Maurice de Jean Hey

Résumé 0

The identity of the donor of the panel of the Kelkingrove Art Gallery & Museum in Glasgow has often been debated since the beginning of the last century with numerous propositions. During the exhibition France 1500 in 2010, the simultaneous presentation of the Glasgow panel with two fragments from the Chicago Art Institute ( Saint John the Evangelist and the Virgin of Sorrow) gave substance to the reconstruction of a diptych with a Carrying of the Cross that Martha Wolff had revealed in the Revue de l’Art in 2005. The identification of a Canon in the members of the chapter of the Cathedral of Saint Maurice d’Angers with the arms: “de gueules aux rais d’escarboucle d’or” became part of the research for a diptych. Among the Angevin sources, the historian Joseph Grandet (1646-1724) provides a paired description of two paintings responding to the characteristics of the diptych sought after by the Maître de Moulins and gives the name of its sponsor “Jean de La Barre, trésorier de l’église d’Angers” (from 1491 until his death in 1503) with a Saint Maurice. The panel of the Carrying of the Cross is poetically evoked in printed form in 1659. Placed above the Saint Nicolas altar, the panels of the diptych were moved several times in the Angevin Cathedral, probably suffering damages during an iconoclastic Huguenot episode in 1562. The proximity of a servant “of the Valois” subtly materialized on the breastplate of the Saint Maurice is found on the epitaph of the treasurer, notary and secretary of King Charles VIII. The highlighting of the intimate link between Jean de La Barre and the main patrons of the Maître de Moulins, Pierre II de Bourbon and Anne de France, the Duc and Duchesse de Bourbon, reinforces this demonstration. The Canon, the very active secretary of the Duchesse from 1478, also appeared as her “contrôleur de la chambre aux deniers” from February 1486 to 1499, probably promoting his own commission to the painter. A last source confirms the dating of the donation to the Cathedral in 1497, which allows replacing this diptych in the work of Jean Hey, thus preceding the Triptych of the Virgin in Glory of Moulins.