Painting: Tales from the White Knight

The hunt is as old as art itself. The an -cient Assyrians celebrated the chase in bas-reliefs, the Chinese in stone drums, the Babylonians and Egyptians in frescoes. Millenniums before, cavemen at the foot of the French Pyrenees depicted a mammoth hunt on their cavern walls. The ingenious killing of beasts larger and more powerful was, after all, the central achievement in man’s ascendancy over other forms of life. But the hunt seems early to have been less of a search for food than a heroic confrontation between man and beast, and a sport worthy of kings. Charlemagne, for instance, reportedly acquired the superlative in his name only after engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an enormous bear and, of course, winning.

How to Pursue. One of the greatest sportsmen of all time was a medieval French knight named Gaston Phebus, Comte de Foix, who cut a dashing figure in the 14th century with his white armor and white charger. Renowned not only as a huntsman but as a lover, a poet and a diplomat, Gaston kept a stable of 600 riding horses, hundreds of stag, buck and boar hounds, and the fastest fleet of greyhounds in medieval Europe. The chase in the Middle Ages was an immensely sophisticated pursuit. Knowing better than any man of his day how it should be pursued, Gaston in 1387 wrote a delightfully detailed treatise on the hunt titled Le Livre de la Chasse.

One of the first how-to books, it was much cribbed and often illuminated; the loveliest of the versions that survive is an edition with gold leaf on vellum that once belonged to Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain. It can now be seen in a display of medieval masterworks at The Cloisters in Manhattan. The miniaturist is unknown, but he seems to have followed the hunt almost as well as his author, perhaps even ridden to hounds with him.

Along with Gaston, he begins with such elementary procedures as how to lay out the hunt party’s lunch, moves on to more sophisticated exercises like setting snares or stalking wild fowl with an artificial cow. One of the most charming illuminations illustrates the high art of camouflage. The huntsman, drawn in a simple wagon by a white palfrey, has concealed himself and the wagon behind leaves and branches.

Head Start on Heaven. By the end of the 14th century, miniaturists had become highly sophisticated and confidently eclectic, adopting whatever suited them out of Hellenic, Byzantine or Oriental styles. The Gaston miniaturist was keenly observant of nature, as his grazing mountain goats testify. When it came to portraying the rugged Pyrenees, however, he resorted to stylized mountains that turn up frequently in Byzantine, Italian and French illuminations. In place of the sky, he painted a decorative pattern common in Middle East miniatures. Though he had not yet learned how to model his figures to give them a more lifelike dimension, he made his flat, jewel-toned colors seem even more precious by the delicate linear tracery of the foliage and touches of gold leaf.

If medieval art rendered man some what smaller than life, hunting hyperbole more than made up for it. Gaston even went so far as to suggest that sportsmen had a head start on heaven. “By hunting, one avoids the sin of indolence,” he reasoned. “And according to our faith, he who avoids the seven mortal sins will be saved; therefore, the good sportsmen will be saved.” Popes Julius II, Leo X and Pius II—who wrote his own treatise on venery under his Christian name, Aeneas Silvius—all enthusiastically rode to hounds. And while papal edict forbade monks to hunt, the church gave its blessing to the chase by proclaiming Hubert, the 8th century Bishop of Liege who saw Christ’s image on a stag’s brow, its patron saint.

Gaston, for his part, displayed the gallantry expected of a noble knight to the very end, giving his life in 1391 to rescue one of his favorite hounds from a mauling bear.