Haute Lecture: Colard Mansion

Reputedly, a drawing of Colard Mansion, right lower corner

Shorn of the over-long Dutch classes and the over-arduous exertion required to meet those demands, feelings of freedom broke out yesterday, Friday 30 March, and at long last I had the time to go to the Groeninge Museum to see the much-advertised exhibition on a famous resident of Brugge, the scribe, translator, eventual printer Colard Mansion, resident here from 1457-1484. Nothing is known of his birthplace or early life nor of his life after 1484 when he completely disappeared from the known world! The priests of Sint Donaas allegedly remarked, 'Colard Mansion is gevlucht!' [Colard Mansion is fled!] at his sudden disappearance in 1484, and without paying the rent due on his atelier in Sint Donaas. The first printed reference to his presence here was in 1457 but it is likely that he lived here before that date.

A page from Colard Mansion's

Ovide Metamorphose

I found the exhibition thrilling, with an impressive range of Mansion exhibits gathered from across Europe and the U.S. The innovative audio guide really enhanced the knowledge available to the lay person but the many stars of the show, huge illustrated Mansion books and manuscripts, were dazzling. The experts who put together the material, headed by Ludo Vandamme from Bruges Library, assembled a variety of manuscripts, illuminated incunabulae and rare prints and books to tell the most important part of the Mansion narrative. [Incunabula, a new word to me, refers to early printed material before 1500.] Perhaps the most stunning of the Mansion exhibits are the Boccaccio and the Ovide Metamorphose, both richly extraordinary in the majesty of the concept, size and realisation.

William Caxton

Brugge in the mid fifteenth century was an international economic and cultural hub. Indeed, late mediaeval Bruges was the market par excellence for fashionable and high-quality products and with the active patronage of Philip the Good, followed inevitably by the aristocratic elite, there were unprecedented opportunities for scribes, miniaturists, printers and bookbinders in Bruges. Mansion began as a scholarly scribe, a skilled copyist, but one document shows that by 1457, the first mention of his name suggests that he already held a certain position in the administrative networks of the city. This experience plus his history of producing richly- illuminated manuscripts, were perfectly timed to coincide with the appearance of book printing, stemming from the revolutionary and iconic Gutenberg Bible in 1455 printed in Mainz by Johannes Gutenberg.

A page from Mansion's Boccaccio.

In actuality, a huge and

sumptuous volume.

Mansion produced illuminated manuscripts only for the luxury market but the advent of printing enabled him to begin to move into luxury book production in the 1470s. He collaborated with William Caxton and produced a Book of Hours in 1475/6, for the English market, long a magnet for Bruges' manuscripts. Soon after this, Caxton returned to England and what had begun as a quest for Mansion into the mechanical production of manuscripts, moved into a fully-fledged luxury book production business. Mansion developed into an assured and courageous entrepreneur, deftly developing his printing and publishing business while remaining an admired scribe, comfortable with Latin, firmly established in a French-speaking world with its strong connection to the wealthy Burgundian court and drawing almost exclusively on a French language body of material for his books.

Caxton served as Governor to the English Nation of Merchant

Adventurers for many years and almost certainly

lived and worked in this building.

Mansion's place of work was in the Burg, in the

precincts of Sint Donaas.

This blog is an enthusiastic introduction only; seriously-interested readers should go to the museum and buy the splendid book, Colard Mansion. Incunabula, Prints and Manuscripts in Medieval Bruges. It contains many scholarly but accessible essays on various aspects of Mansion's life and work.

The Wurtlitzer Connection

Pre-Triennale foundations in the canal along the Potterierei.

 Sunday morning, March 25^th, I delivered something to a friend’s house then wandered along the Potterierei and was quite taken by a large, heavy-looking structure in the water, almost certainly a foundation for an art installation in the Triennale due to open in mid-May. The first Triennale in 2015 was most diverting and interesting. It involved around 18 structures – artistic creations often with narratives added, by various artists and, I think, architects, at points around the city. I loved the unexpected and thought-provoking attention it aroused among residents and tourists. I await Triennale 2, named The Liquid City, impatiently.

Towards the end of the canal, before the Dampoort, I stopped for a coffee at Het Molenhuis, already open at 10.00 a.m. though quite far from the centre and thirsty tourists. My padded jacket enabled me to sit outside and read but when I went inside to pay, a great delight was on show. A genuine Wurtlitzer had been installed and it instantly took me back to the very occasional visit to the cinema when I was young and the more regular visits of early womanhood. Glamour; music; excitement!

' T Molenhuis

Rudolph Wurtlitzer

1829-1914

The owner corrected my immediate assumption; it was not an early original but a reproduction, he said. Couldn’t wait to go googlen, as they write here! Wurtlitzer has been synonymous with up-to-the-minute juke-boxes since the early Thirties and if I had thought of them at all, I would have assumed they were now defunct.

Oh the joys of finding out stuff online! The Wurtlitzer family began making musical instruments in the seventeenth century in Saxony but the ‘father’of the original American company was Rudolph, born in 1829. He emigrated to America, against his father's wishes, at the age of 24 and in 1856 founded the Rudolph Wurtlitzer Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, initially to import his family’s instruments though eventually Rudolph moved into manufacturing himself. His factory produced the first Wurtlitzer piano in 1880 followed by the first coin-operated electric piano, the Tonophone, in 1896 which became an overnight sensation and won a gold medal at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. So by the age of forty, Rudolph was demonstrating a flair for innovation and commercial creativity!

Close-up of a Mighty Wurtlitzer

Historical coincidence often provides a wonderful niche when innovation miraculously discovers a developing and amenable context and thus it was for Rudolph. The Wurtlitzer Company’s inventive flair and use of advanced technology happened synonymously with the advent of silent films and the Mighty Wurtlitzers created an instant impact. These fostered Wurtlitzer-driven sound tracks to the movies and led eventually to the first patented jukebox machines in 1933. They could produce bird tweets, thunder rolls, steam engine roars and car horn hoots! Europe's largest and still playable Mighty Wurtlitzer with over 1000 pipes and 299 stops, is today housed in Berlin's Musical Instrument Museum.

Farny Wurtlitzer, Rudolph’s successor, had the vision to add highly-skilled professionals to his entourage to design and market what became the Wurtlitzer Debutante. By the late 1930s, the Company was producing around 45,000 juke-boxes a year!

In the late 1930s and throughout the 40s the Wurtlitzer chief designer was the gifted Paul Fuller and he took the inventiveness and charm of the product to a higher level yet. From 1941 Wurtlitzer factories had to switch to war-related production and the use of metal and plastics was severely curtailed. The firm, aka Paul Fuller, responded by designing and producing several revolutionary prototypes using mainly wood and glass. In 1946 the Wurtlitzer 1015 was introduced and became an immediate hit with its sophisticated styling, revolving colour columns and modern, record-changing mechanism. Post war, American G.I.s took the jukeboxes with them to an astonished West Germany and between 1955 and1960 jukebox numbers totalled around 50,000 in that country.

Wurtlitzer 1015

1946

My interest was sparked that Sunday morning when I wandered along the canal and into Het Molenhuis and saw the resident 1015. I think it might be the 1015 One More Time, described as: ‘a nostalgic reproduction of the original Model 1015 that has been up-dated with state-of-the-art digital technology’ Perfectly in keeping with the values and vision of the original Wurlitzer Company.

Honestly, there is a surprise around every corner here in Brugge and in one small, canal-side estaminet, there is a whole narrative in one reborn, glowing objet d'art.