Qui était Jean Fouquet pour François Robertet ? Une question d'auctorialité dans l'art de la fin du Moyen Âge

Artistic authorship intends to define the relationship that unites an artist to an artwork. In the 1960s, artists who began to delegate the fabrication of their works of art to others challenged the conventional paradigm of authenticity as prime criterion of authorship. This article surveys the precedent of late medieval artistic authorship through a case study of French court painter Jean Fouquet (c. 1420-1481). In the 1490s, ducal secretary François Robertet ascribed most of the miniatures of an illuminated volume of the Antiquités judaïques to Fouquet’s “hand”, which François Avril reattributed in 2003 to the “hand” of his chief associate, the Master of the Munich Boccacio. In attempting to reconcile these two seemingly opposing ideas of Fouquet’s “hand”, this essay unveils the strategies by which a late medieval French painter could assert, claim, or be credited by his clients with the authorship of artworks that had been respectively painted by his own hand, entrusted to his associate, or delegated to journeymen active in their workshop.