In Monte Artium

Jean Tagault was an important surgeon and academician in Paris during the first half of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless only very little is known about his person. This article discusses his biography, his academic career, and his family. The history of his dispute with Michael Servetus and Jean Thibault is sketched. The significance of his frequent mentions in the Chirurgia magna, once attributed to Vesalius, is analysed. His presumed plagiary of Vesalius’ Tabulae anatomicae sex (1538) is discussed too. An overview of the different editions of the works by Jean Tagault is included.

The Royal Library of Belgium holds three peculiar cityscapes of the city of Mechelen that have not been studied in any detail before. They show the city in two of its most distressful moments: the Spanish (1572) and English (1580) furies, both gruesome episodes in the Dutch Revolt. The present article is a first attempt to place the cityscapes in a wider context. It provides an overview of the history of the city of Mechelen in the late sixteenth century and then moves on to a closer study of the cityscapes in question. By looking at contemporary sources of a similar nature (cartography, printed depictions of the Revolt) and by sketching the outlines of the contexts in which these sources were produced and circulated, it hopes to provide new insight into the cityscapes under scrutiny, as well as to the function of similar sources in the post-Revolt Low Countries.

The Manuscripts Department of the Royal Library of Belgium do possess about fifteen ancient herbaria. Among these, there is a set of three rather damaged large volumes (for c.1400 specimens, mostly of large format), clearly dating from the seventeenth century by an author of uncertain identity. Thanks to the support of the Fund Abbot Manoël de la Serna (managed by the King Baudouin Foundation), a project including the complete restoration of these three volumes and the digitization of this thematic collection has been set up to ensure the conservation and communication of these herbaria in the best conditions, while preserving their integrity and specificity. The conservation of live bound herbaria raises many questions, dealt with by a specific literature, generated in particular by natural history museums. A fundamental element of this type of object lies in the coexistence of two elements that are a priori poorly compatible : one rigid and brittle - the dried plant - and the other flexible - the support paper. In this case, restoration allows to replace hundreds of detached plants fragments and to stabilize the degradations of the paper support while respecting the binding as well as the scientific interest in the broad sense of the concerned herbarium.

A rather large number of antique coins bear a countermark that depicts a small eagle on gold or silver. The author argues the thesis, already discussed for several centuries, that this eagle is not the emblem of the Gonzaga family of Mantua, but instead the ownership mark - affixed in the late sixteenth century - of the Este family, Dukes of Ferrara and later of Modena. Some of their coins were pawned as collateral for a loan from 1614 until 1646, and eventually they were sold over a period of many years - in the 1640s, in the 1650s, and finally in the 1790s. Many coins from this collection can be found in the museums of Florence, Milan, Modena and Paris, but additional examples have been dispersed worldwide. One such piece belongs to the Royal Library of Belgium, a rare dupondius of Titus in the guise of the divinized Augustus. A remarkable fact is that this type is copied from a coin of Tiberius, of which an example with the Este countermark is also known.

The Manuscrits Department of the Royal Library of Belgium holds a part of the archives of Léon Gauchez (Bruxelles 1827-Paris 1907), art collector, critique, art dealer and Belgian patron gravitating around Brussels, Paris, Lille and London. This contribution wants to highlight the Italian network of contacts which emerges from the precious correspondence housed in the Royal Library of Belgium as well as from analysing L’Art, the journal he founded in Paris. These documents show that Léon Gauchez is connected to several intellectuals and Italian artists operating in Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa and to the Society Donatello of Florence. The contacts mostly aim to publish in his magazine but also, in certain circumstances, to find art works to be moved around the international markets. In these testimonies transpire the strong interest of Léon Gauchez for the political and artistical Italian reality. Collaborations, exchanges of views and sales of art works emerge and lead to numerous avenues of research and reflexion. It was therefore deemed important to follow the path mapped by these documents and to create the role of this interesting figure who, in the Seventies and Eighties of the nineteenth century, serves as an artistical bridge between Belgium and Italy.

The Godefroid Devreese collection entered the coin-cabinet of the Royal Library of Belgium in 2013. In addition to 45 coins, it contains 964 medals - of which over 300 were executed by Devreese himself. The rest is the work of more than 170 different engravers, here listed in appendix. Most of these artists are Belgian or French, active in the second half of the nineteenth or the first half of the twentieth century. The cataloging of this group revealed some previously unknown pieces, including the plaque Vers l’Espérance and a study of a female dancer. The work of Godefroid Devreese was the subject of a catalogue by Albert Willenz in 1986, but a new catalogue raisonné - including unpublished medals and plaquettes - will be published late 2018.

This article is the result of an internship at the KBR. It summarizes twenty years of correspondence between Maeterlinck and a mysterious American notable, Florence Perkins, from the 1920s to the 1940s, during his emigration to the United States. These letters show the genesis of works that became a real success, now a little forgotten, the author’s close relationship with the natural and occult sciences, intellectual and literary exchanges, but also numerous biographical details concerning the management of his real estate, the organization of his days including at the time of the Second World War and the conflicts with Georgette Leblanc, his first companion. Maeterlinck’s political vision appears unperturbed, both his fear of the « Bolshevik Revolution » and that of the German invasion, which he feels imminent, or his clear sympathy for Salazar and his Minister of Propaganda. The opportunity for the reader to discover the aging writer, far from the romanticized vision we have today.

The object of this article is to explore the challenges in creating a Belgian legal deposit of electronic publications in a complex institutional context. This article also aims to explain the current issues when many stakeholders must be consulted in order to maximize the chances of success of such a project. Conventional issues such as legal, technical and organizational aspects, although clearly identified and well-known by experts, still constitute a significant challenge when moving from theory to practice. Similarly, building an organizational model suitable to all stakeholders is an additional challenge. It is interesting to share our experience about this transition before the project is fully achieved. The experience of the royal library of belgium is relevant (/pertinent) in several respects : it consists in putting into practice a complex model and in analysing all the factors of success, including those related to human aspects. The originality of this article lies indeed in its will to highlight the human dimension. Concepts such as consultation, collaboration or trust have become essential to develop an operational tool. Our intention is to illustrate this with concrete examples.