Talk:Rohan Hours

Can I remove the spurious references to Andre Beauneveu??

I propose removing the section under Artists begining "An alternate theory suggests that the artist was André Beauneveu..." - does anyone have any objections?

My reasoning is as follows; 1) Every serious art historian who has ever worked on the Rohan Hours dates it to 1420's or later, i.e. at least 20 years after Beauneveu's death. To argue against this one would therefore need some convincing documentary evidence. 2) As far as I can tell, the ONLY person suggesting a much earlier date and a link to Beauneveu is an enthusiastic amateur who has self-published on the web (number 5 in the refs). That source presents a range of highly imaginative but totally unsubstantiated speculations. Whilst I appreciate that WP has to be open to alternative POVs, those POVs do need to be backed up by some kind of proper academic research or peer-reviewed publication. Personal speculations or unpublished research, however imaginative, don't really have a place here. 3) The claimed resemblance of the St John figures to Jean de Berry is nonsense. The facial types appearing in the RH are typical of generic facial types across a broad range of International Gothic manuscripts from Paris to Prague and there is no reason to assume that they are cryptoportraits of Berry or anyone else 4) Similarly, the idea that Beauneveu trained the Limbourg brothers is pure fantasy. Apart from the total lack of evidence that they were ever in the same place (the Limbourgs only appear in Berry's accounts after Beauneveu's death), the styles of the two workshops are clearly very different.

Whilst I'm all for independent scholars and enthusiastic amateurs challenging the authority of the art-historical establishment, Wikipedia isn't really the place for unsubstantiated speculation and fantasy - otherwise we might as well start citing Dan Brown as an authority on Da Vinci. So... unless anyone has some reasoned objections, I'll go ahead and clean up the section on Artists to reflect the art-historical mainstream opinion. StuartLondon (talk) 10:46, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Just go ahead. In such cases you can record the diff here, with a brief note as above. But if it only really comes from the internet source cited, which has a wide range of similar er original ideas, there is probably no need. Johnbod (talk) 12:07, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

'tis done! StuartLondon (talk) 12:12, 8 July 2009 (UTC)