Any other business

Waiting Line, 2020 (detail; the full painting is 16 x 23 cm) Jean Claracq is a young artist whose work I first came across at the Sultana gallery in Paris and at a couple of institutional group exhibitions. Then, when I went to an open day at Le Houloc, a studio in the Paris suburbs shared by nearly 20 young artists (invited by the amazingly dynamic Célia Coëtte ), I had the good fortune to meet him and was able to visit his studio space there. He often works on a small scale, and thus sometimes combines contemporary content with references (direct quotations or not) to medieval manuscripts, portrait miniatures such as Hilliard's, the details (landscapes, perspectives, distant cities, forests, skies...) of renaissance art, and oriental painting of, e.g., Iran's negargari tradition. When I visited Le Houloc, as I take an amateurish interest in Iranian art, I was interested to see he was working on a small painting, at that time just sketched out, to be called Waiting Line  (a...

Surely one of the greatest of all illuminated manuscripts is the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp , produced in Tabriz for the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I in the first half of the 16th century. Famously, this book, sometimes called the Houghton Shahnameh , which survived intact until the 1970s, was broken up by its then owner, Arthur Houghton, partly to donate and partly for sale. Wikipedia tells the story , as also does this 1996 article from the International Herald Tribune , published when four pages came up for auction at Sotheby's in London. The Wikipedia page includes a link to a high-resolution reproduction of one of the most famous pages of the book, the  scene showing The Court of Gayumars , which can be greatly magnified, making it possible to to examine the fascinating details. As Wikipedia relates, in the 1990s a deal was made with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) to swap a De Kooning painting for about 120 illuminated pages of the great Shahnameh . As far as I know...

The Trinity Apocalypse is a 13th-century illuminated manuscript, with texts in French, in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge . It contains 75 miniatures illustrating the life of St John and his visions. Some of them are absolutely outstanding. And the great thing is, you can browse through the whole book and magnify the pages to see the details  here . Photos: Trinity College, Cambridge