Les ateliers Le Prince, méthode de recherche et premiers résultats

Résumé 0

Engrand Le Prince is the most famous member of a family of stained glass painters of the Renaissance, active in Beauvais from the 1490s to the middle of the 16th century. Jean Lafond reconstituted their corpus of works, augmented by numerous unpublished fragments discovered on the occasion of the Recensement des Vitraux Anciens de France (Census of Ancient French Stained Glass Windows). This article presents a territorial approach and the method adopted in the context of an ongoing thesis as well as a series of first results. In question, among others, are unpublished works, such as l’ Eros Endormi ( Sleeping Eros) in the Chateau of Azay-le-Rideau and l’ Annonciation (Annunciation) of Hodenc en Bray that has now disappeared. Several stained glass windows by the Le Prince family are equally examined in order to distinguish the activity of the different masters and that of their assistants, while demonstrating their collaborations, as in the stained glass windows in the church of Sainte Foy in Conches-en-Ouche (bay 4) and in the cathedral Saint Pierre in Beauvais (bay 324) where Nicolas Le Prince and his colleague Romain Buron, active in Gisors, seemed to have been involved. Finally, the interactions between the different Le Prince workshops are considered on the basis of the tools used and more especially the reproduction of the same stenciled decorative motifs, allowing a better understanding of the functioning of this group and the professional ties uniting the members of this family.