Le Paradis des prières

12mo, 20 and 444 ff.
Light Havana calf, large mosaic and gilt armorials of Henri IV and Marie de Medici in the center of the boards, armorial shield of France and Medici on citron and red mosaic morocco onlays, repeated 4 times at the corners, 24 lozenge-shaped spandrels decorated in gilt with small tools on red and citron mosaic morocco pieces along the side borders, smooth spine decorated with 3 coats of arms for Henri IV and Marie de Medici on red morocco mosaics surrounded by 16 small gilt lozenge-shaped spandrels, two with Medici armorial devices, on citron and red mosaic morocco, gilt fillet on edges, marvelous gilt edges exquisitely chiselled, decorated and painted in black, red, and green. Wedding binding of Henri IV and Marie de Medici, made circa December 1600.

150 x 85 mm.

Mosaic and decorated binding made in December 1600 to celebrate the marriage of King Henry IV and Marie de Medici on:

Granada, Louis de (1504-1588). The Paradise of the Prayers of R. P. F. Louÿs de Granada. Collected in Latin from his spiritual works and those of other serious and devout authors by Michel Isselt, German, and rendered in our language by F. François Bourbon, Celestine of Paris.
Paris, Guillaume de la Nove, 1601.

The only mosaic binding with the combined arms of Henry IV and Marie de Medici, adorned with gilt, tooled, and painted edges, celebrating their union on December 17, 1600, and preserved in perfect condition.

Ernest Quentin Bauchart knows of only two rather classic types of bindings: “The books of Marie de Medici are of two kinds; some, the oldest, are covered, like those of de Thou, with rich gilding featuring scrollwork, foliage, or arabesques, entirely covering the spine and boards of the volume, or decorated, like those of Marguerite de Valois, with crowns of branches linked together, but these crowns are alternately filled with fleurs-de-lis, barred S’s ($), and the queen’s monogram; the others have less rich ornamentation, a simple semé where the royal cipher and the fleur-de-lis alternate, repeating at equal intervals but without any other framing than plain straight lines. Sometimes the symmetry of the design is broken by arms and crowned ciphers in the corners; finally, the gilding is sometimes even less complicated, consisting of a simple center with branches where the arms of France are joined with those of Tuscany.

It is thought that these bindings, distinguished by their great solidity, came from the hands of the last of the Eve family, from those of Rué (Ruette) and Henri le Duc, who at that time held the office of ordinary bookbinders to the king.”

“When Marie de Medici set foot on French soil in 1600, her first encounters with France took place under the sign of literature. Greeted in Marseille by Guillaume Du Vair, the protector of Peiresc, she was welcomed at her next stop, Aix-en-Provence, by Malherbe. In Lyon, where the meeting with Henry IV and a somewhat hurried marriage finally occurred, Italian literature was honored: poetry first, with The Encounter of the Muses, which offered in a ‘bilingual’ Franco-Italian edition about forty love sonnets by the principal French poet of the time, Philippe Desportes, whom Malherbe was trying to displace, and then theater (the Commedia dell’arte, with the troupe of Tristano Martinelli, whom Henry IV brought from Mantua, dedicating to the king and queen a humorous collection, the Compositions de rhétorique de M. Don Arlequin, now known from a single copy).

A queen of France was obviously destined to sponsor what was essential in the production of booksellers, notably illustrated books. Especially as she was as devout as Marie.

The queen attracted the dedications of lives of saints and blessed figures, a literary and editorial genre in full expansion at the beginning of the 17^th century.

No inventory of Marie de Medici’s library exists and almost nothing is known about it. Where was it kept, at the Louvre or the Luxembourg Palace? The, admittedly late, inventories of the Louvre library drawn up at the end of the 17^th century do not mention any volume that belonged to her.

The rare volumes bearing her arms preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France come, except for two, from revolutionary confiscations.

The old work by Ernest Quentin Bauchart gives the only known list of books that belonged to Marie de Medici. Of this list of 35 items, I must remove six: no. 3, a book dedicated to Catherine de Medici; nos. 8, 20, 30, and 31, which are prize books, bound with the queen’s arms but in sheepskin or inferior quality morocco; and no. 25, considered to be the dedication copy for Marie of François de Rosset’s translation of Ariosto, but actually a copy from the late 1644 edition in a binding from the late 17^th century. That leaves 29 volumes. Research I carried out fairly quickly, and which would need to be expanded, enabled me to identify about fifty new volumes, almost all bound with the queen’s arms or cipher. Altogether, this comes to no more than about 80 volumes.

The vast majority of the queen’s books known to me are bound elegantly and plainly with her cipher and arms, most often with a semé decoration. But Marie de Medici’s real innovation in books lies elsewhere, in a very particular group of extraordinary devotional books that are true jewels and represent a unique moment in the history of the decorative arts. They are covered with bindings made at the start of the 17th century which are the most beautiful ever produced in France. Generally, they bear neither the arms nor the monogram of the queen, and only additional indications have allowed me to understand that they were made for her.” (Isabelle de Cornihaut. University Press).

This mosaic binding bears the arms of the king and the queen and could be the first binding made in France for the queen.

Provenance: Henry IV and Marie de Medici; Mary and Bill de Soyecourt (bookplate); Hubert de Ganay (bookplate).