L'Imitation de Jésus-Christ

First issue of this spectacular edition of The Imitation of Christ, published by Léon Curmer in 1856-1857 and conceived throughout in imitation of illuminated manuscripts. The volume comprises 437 chromolithographed pages, each set within a broad polychrome border heightened with gold and almost always different; facing pages are frequently designed to answer one another decoratively. Five compositions occupy a full page, and all leaves are mounted on guards. The separately published Appendix of 1858 is not present.

Publisher’s binding in full old red morocco, signed L. Curmer at the foot of the inner gilt border on the front pastedown. As Curmer was the publisher rather than the binder, the workshop responsible for these bindings has not been identified. Spine with five raised bands, compartments framed with triple blind rules, title gilt, boards framed with triple blind rules, broad gilt turn-ins, floral endleaves in gold and red, all edges gilt. Foxing to the endleaves and half-title, rare elsewhere in the volume, with a few very pale spots in the blank margins. Dampstain along part of the lower joint, one corner slightly exposed, and small knocks to the outer edge. A very fine copy.

The volume is further enriched with a signed autograph presentation inscription written within the central cartouche of one of the chromolithographed pages: “A Mesdemoiselles / Fannély & Clotilde Arragon / souvenir / de mon ordination, / XXII décembre MDCCCLXVI, / Marc Burdin / prêtre.” Only a few years after publication, the luxury book thus returned to its original devotional purpose, presented as a keepsake of a priestly ordination.

Curmer here set out to recreate, through the modern means of chromolithography, the appearance of the illuminated manuscripts he admired in the great European collections. His artists copied models preserved notably at the Bibliothèque impériale, the Arsenal, Sainte-Geneviève, Rouen, Strasbourg, the British Museum and Oxford; Count Auguste de Bastard advised him in selecting the earliest examples. French manuscripts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries predominate, alongside Italian, German, Spanish and Eastern models.

The technical ambition was considerable, Curmer stating that each page required between three and fourteen successive colour printings and that more than nine hundred lithographic stones were needed for the work as a whole. The text itself was integrated into the chromolithographic process: composed by Jules Claye, it was transferred to stone so that it could be printed together with the borders by Lemercier. Some twenty years after the first major developments of French chromolithography, Curmer thus pushed the process beyond the reproduction of individual images to recreate the complete visual unity of an illuminated manuscript page.

The text chosen is Michel de Marillac’s translation, following the Paris edition published by Nicolas Gasse in 1626. Curmer thus returned to an early French version of one of Europe’s most widely circulated devotional books, while giving it a form that belongs entirely to the nineteenth century.

With its hundreds of fully coloured pages, gold ornament and morocco binding, the work translates medieval illumination into the language of luxury industrial publishing. The 1866 presentation inscription brings the story naturally full circle: conceived as a bibliophilic monument, the book became, in Marc Burdin’s hands, a personal keepsake of religious life.