Oresme's Role in Designing the Programs of Illustration

Oresme's multifaceted career does not include any obvious connection with the visual arts. Yet his training in Aristotelian and scholastic logic may have spurred him to emphasize definition and demonstration as essential tools of both verbal and visual arguments. Likewise, his absorption of Aristotelian, Roman, and medieval rhetorical works may have guided his organization of the visual structures of

the programs. His choice of contrasting representational modes of personification, metaphor, and allegory for the Ethiques and paradigm for the Politiques and Yconomique may reflect the application of general rhetorical strategies.

In a different vein, Oresme's many writings on natural science involve theories of vision and perception, light, and color.^[64] Furthermore, Oresme was familiar with the importance Aristotle himself assigned to images. For example, in Oresme's De causis mirabilium and his Questiones super libros Aristotelis de anima , he devotes many passages to discussing theories of cognition and memory based on the Philosopher's classic works.^[65] In the De memoria et reminiscentia and the De anima , Aristotle assigns a crucial role to images in the processes of human thought and memory. As Janet Coleman states: "What we perceive and thereafter conceive must be imageable by the mind. Not only is memory pictorial but Aristotle assumes the world can be known empirically: signs, words, images do correspond for the most part to objective reality in a satisfactory way."^[66] Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers also have shown that scholastic memory treatises and other medieval texts emphasize the role of visual images in locating and assimilating ethical concepts.^[67] By inscribing verbal concepts within the illustrations' pictorial field, Oresme could enrich the scope of his arguments and, by association, imprint words and images within the memory of the reader.

Oresme's writings on physical and natural science may connect with an interest in aesthetics taken up in various and sometimes unexpected contexts. One such instance is the concept of proportion. An early Latin writing, De proportionibus proportionum , discusses the topic in mathematical terms.^[68] The concept of proportion in relationship to the body politic is a feature of Oresme's influential treatise De moneta. Proporcion and proporcionalité are neologisms Oresme introduced into French while translating the section on Distributive Justice in Book V of the Ethiques .^[69]

Oresme's theoretical interests and training may well have affected his planning of the program of illustrations. But his role of designer took place within a well-defined system of book production.^[70] Patrick de Winter points out that along with the libraires , official booksellers, and stationnaires , "the equivalent of modern publishers," écrivains , or scribes, had considerable responsibility for the execution of a manuscript. Ecrivains not only carried out the system of rubrication and laid out the book but also hired the illuminators, miniaturists, and perhaps the binders for luxury books.^[71] Among the official écrivains of Charles V was Raoulet d'Orléans, who worked on two manuscripts of the king's copies of the Ethiques and the Politiques, C and D .^[72] Raoulet d'Orléans was one of the most honored copyists of his time. Twelve manuscripts dating from 1362 to 1396 carry his signature,^[73] and his composition of several long verse colophons to manuscripts that he copied reveal his self-confidence and pride. In one of them, a Bible historiale presented to Charles V, he mentions the lavish nature of the book's decoration and praises the efforts of the person who brought it together. The implication is that he acted as the coordinator of the book's production.^[74]

Oresme worked closely with Raoulet in re-editing the layout and text revisions of the second set of Charles V's copies of the Ethiques and the Politiques .^[75] As

master of the text, the translator would also have designed the revised program of illustrations, as he would have done for the first two copies of his translation of the Ethics and the Politics . Independently, or with Raoulet's help, Oresme would have forwarded instructions to the miniaturist responsible for the execution of the illustrations. Since new illustrations were required, scholars assume that the translator who had knowledge of a given work would have been the person to furnish such instructions. The outstanding example of such an explicit, verbal set of instructions occurs in Jean Lebègue's edition of Sallust dating from 1418 to 1420. The illustrations in a surviving manuscript correspond exactly to these instructions.^[76] Contemporary with the Ethics and the Politics translations, a manuscript of a moral treatise, Le miroir du monde , includes instructions to the illuminator for a series of fifteen images of virtues and vices.^[77] A related, if rare, tradition in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French manuscripts provides a written explication to the reader of an unusual or complicated program of illustration. The earliest surviving example is contained in the Belleville Breviary of about 1330.^[78] François Avril discovered an anonymous guide to the meaning of an unusual frontispiece to the second volume of a Bible historiale commissioned by Charles V.^[79] As noted elsewhere, Oresme furnished such an explanation at the beginning of the king's first copy of the Politiques . Another contemporary example of a program of illustration based on written instructions to the illuminator is the presentation copy of Raoul de Presles's translation of Augustine's City of God .^[80] Here, Sharon Smith found that the iconography of various illustrations depends on certain obscure passages of glosses furnished by the translator, who alone would have been familiar with their content. The same observation holds true for key illustrations in Charles V's copies of the Ethiques and the Politiques .^[81] In other words, the illustrations constitute another level of translation of concepts and other interpretive materials familiar only to Oresme.

Unfortunately, no written program for the illustrations of the Ethiques and the Politiques survives. Nor are there traces in the margins of Charles V's copies of these texts of abbreviated verbal instructions to the illuminator, rough sketches, or notes for background color or patterns, notes so meticulously recorded in Charles V's copy of the Grandes chroniques de France .^[82] Yet, as the discussion in Parts II and III will disclose, Oresme's role as designer of the programs of illustrations of his translations of the Ethics and the Politics emerges from the close relationship between the illuminations and his texts, glosses, glossaries of difficult words, and index of noteworthy subjects.