Enrico Thovez per Van Eyck miniatore : un dibattito di inizio Novecento sulle Heures de Turin

Enrico Thovez on Van Eyck's Illuminations. An Early Twentieth-century Debate about the Heures de TurinThe paper reconstructs the discovery of the Heures de Turin around the end of the 19th century and early decades of the twentieth, bringing out into the open the important role of the scholar and writer Enrico Thovez. In January 1897, when he was a young graduate of humanities, he tracked down the Heures de Turin in the National Library of Turin, using the work as the basis for an article, in which he named the Van Eyck brothers as the artists responsible for some of the illuminations (Sfogliando un codice, ʻLa Stampaʼ, 27 July 1900). Meanwhile the Heures de Turin also began to attract attention in the context of French academic studies. In 1902, from Paris, Paul Durrieu promoted a photographic campaign of the manuscript, whilst in the following year, in the pages of ʻGazette des Beaux-Artsʼ, he attributed the illuminations in the Heures de Turin to the Van Eycks.

The dramatic fire of 1904, that involved the whole Turinese library, sending the manuscript up in smoke, offered Thovez the opportunity to return to a discussion of the Heures de Turin, at that point irreparably lost. Besides establishing the serious damage that such a loss represented, Thovez attempted to re-establish the precedence of his own attribution over that of Durrieu, which in the meantime had been received with much support in France. [Publisher's text]