New perspectives on the Bréviaire de Belleville: a royal commission? Nouvelles perspectives sur le Bréviaire de Belleville : une commande royale ? En Fr

Résumé En

A masterpiece of 14th-century illumination, the Bréviaire de Belleville, has long been linked to Jeanne de Belleville and her husband Olivier de Clisson. The question of who originally commissioned this work has recently been the subject of renewed discussion centering on the hypothesis of the order coming from a family closely linked to the Capetians and later to the Valois (Marc Gil, 2013). The acquisition in 2016 by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France of a previously unknown breviary comissioned by Louis X le Hutin (François Avril, 2017), gives rise to new reflections on the origin of the Bréviaire de Belleville. The affiliation between the newly discovered manuscript withthe Bréviaire de Belleville and with that of Charles V has placed the Bréviaire de Bellevillein a prestigious line of royal manuscripts, between the era of Louis X le Hutin and Charles V. We thus propose to see in the Bréviaire de Belleville a royal commission initiated by Charles IV le Bel, king of France from 1322 to 1328, under whose reign theBréviaire was made.