Le Tournoy ou le Roy Henri 2 fut blessé á mort le dernier de Iuin. 1559.
Plate 3 from Jacques Tortorel and Jean Perrissin. Le Premier volume, contenant quarante tableaux ou Histoires diverses qui sont mémorables touchant les Guerres, Massacres, & Troubles advenus en France en ces dernieres annees. Le tout recueilli selon le tesmoignage de ceux qui y ont esté en personne, & qui les on veus, lesquels sont pourtrais à la verité. [Geneva: Nicolas Castellin & Pierre Le Vignon, 1570].
Single-sheet wood-engraving[1] (sheet: 14 7/8” x 19 3/8”, 367mm x 491mm; frame: 20 ½” x 20 5/8”), signed “I[2] PERRISSIM • FECIT • 1570” at the lower edge of the plate. Letterpress title and caption outside the plate-mark.
Float-mounted and framed with Museum Glass. Central fold (from publication) along with some creases (especially at lower-right) and nicks to the edges. Upper edge shaved, touching the capitals of the title. A good impression.
In 1569, Nicolas Castellin and Pierre Le Vignon commissioned a revolutionary book: one that sought to tell recent history pictorially. It was not the first to do so, but it was the first to be done not at the behest of a monarch or a party, not to glorify — but to inform the public. The story to be told was the origins of the French Wars of Religion and the power-vacuum that brought to a head the long-simmering tension between French Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots, Calvinists) and ending (by some reckonings) with the Edict of Nantes (1598), granting in name if not in fact religious equality. This peace obtained for most of the XVIIc, ending with Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau (1685).
The present plate illustrates the starting-gun of the Wars of Religion: Henri II’s wounding — quite by accident — in the eye, which led to his death. The wound was sustained from the shattered lance of Gabriel de Lorges, Comte de Montgomery during a joust at the Place des Vosges in celebration of two marriages: the king’s daughter to the King of Spain and the king’s sister to the Duke of Savoy. Henri was reportedly wearing the colors of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers; could Perrissin be mocking him with the inscription at right (“HEN•II•GRA•DEI•/REX•GALL•INVICTISS”, Henri II by the Grace of God the Unconquered King of the French)?
This ophthalmic trauma was compounded by the trajectory of one of the splinters upward causing a subdural hemorrhage, a bleed between the brain and skull. Henri was rushed to his chambers, and while his surgeons cleared the accessible splinters and bled him (12 ounces!), the great medical men of Europe — including Andreas Vesalius and Ambroise Paré — were summoned to attend the king. His medical team experimented with lances into the eye sockets of recently decapitated men, in the hopes of understanding the precise type of trauma. Neither Vesalius nor Paré nor any other doctor was able to save the king, and he died 10 July 1559.
The text below can be rendered: “King Henry, having made peace with the King of Spain, celebrating the weddings of his daughter whom he had given him in marriage, and of his sister Madame Marguerite, whom he had also given in marriage to the Duke of Savoy, and wishing to have a joust with the Count of Montgomery, was mortally wounded, and greatly lamented by his subjects.”
Our engraving was part of the great collection of “fête books,” as they are known, amassed by Paul and Marianne Gourary. After Paul’s death in 2007, the collection — “Splendid Ceremonies” — was sold by Christie’s New York (12 June 2009), in which the present item was lot 341.
Wellcome 42593i.
Quarante Tableaux: Benedict, Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin; Brunet V.892-895; Mortimer-Hofer-Jackson, Harvard XVIc French Books II.421; Robert-Dumesnil VI.46-69.
[1] Some references call it an etching-engraving; the plates in the Quarante Tableaux were made by several means.
[2] IP (i.e., Iean) monogram within an oval.
Item #JLR0520
Price: $7,500