, a deadly fire depicted by the
Master of Anthony of Burgundy, from the
Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse, his most lavishly decorated manuscript. Louis appears to have been the second largest purchaser in the period, after Philip the Good, of
illuminated manuscripts from the best Flemish workshops, then at their peak of success. He appears to have had a book collection totalling 190 volumes, mostly secular in content, of which over half were contemporary illuminated copies. This made his collection over twice the size of the contemporary
English Royal collection. He seems to have incorporated portraits of himself in miniatures in several books, as an extra figure, wearing the collar of the Fleece, appears in his copies but not in similar compositions in other copies of the same works. Many of his volumes passed to King
Louis XII of France and are now in the
Bibliotheque nationale de France, including his four-volume
Froissart (BNF, Fr 2643-6) which contains 112 miniatures painted by the best Brugeois artists of the day, among them Loiset Lyédet, to whom the miniatures in the first two volumes are attributed. The other two volumes were done by the anonymous illuminators known as the
Master of Anthony of Burgundy, the
Master of Margaret of York, and the
Master of the Dresden Prayerbook as an assistant. Among other artists who worked for Louis de Gruuthuse was also the
Master of the Flemish Boethius, who i.a. illustrated what was probably Gruuthuse's last commission, a sumptuous copy of
Boethius from 1492. The
Gruuthuse manuscript, containing
vernacular poetry, was owned by the Belgian
noble family van Caloen of
Koolkerke near
Bruges until it was sold to the
Dutch Royal Library in
The Hague in February 2007. Another manuscript, the ''Penitence d'Adam'', of 1472, was dedicated to him by the famous Bruges scribe, and later printer,
Colard Mansion. Louis was in fact one of the last people to commission new manuscripts on such a scale; he probably began collecting books in the late 1460s, with many of his major commissions dating from the 1470s. In some cases even from that decade the titles already existed in printed form, and by the end of his life most titles could be bought printed, and Flemish illumination, especially of secular works, was in deep decline. The collapse of the Burgundian state after the death of Charles the Bold further worsened this position, and there is documentation showing Louis allowed Edward IV of England to buy a
Josephus commissioned by him from the workshop, and encouraged him to make other purchases of Flemish manuscripts, probably in an attempt to maintain an industry in crisis. ==References and sources==