Self-Portrait of Simon Bening, One of the Greatest Manuscript Illuminators of the Sixteenth Century

In 1558, at the age of 75, the Flemish manuscript illuminator Simon Bening (Benninck) painted a Self-Portrait miniature of himself. The watercolor on vellum is preserved in the Victoria & Albert Museum  (P. 159-1910). For unknown reasons Bening made a second and virtually identifical copy of the painting that is preserved in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bening was one of the most distinguished artists of the final flowering of the Ghent-Bruges school of manuscript illumination. Ironically, manuscript illumination may have reached its pinnacle about 100 years after the introduction of printing by movable type. After the death of Bening, and others of his generation, artistic achievement in this field for the most part declined or ceased. 

"Simon Benninck never travelled to England, but his daughter was one of a small band of manuscript illuminators (illustrators) who moved from the Low Countries to London in order to work for King Henry VIII. As the invention of printing gradually made both the manuscript and its illumination redundant, illuminators drew on the tradition of secular naturalism to produce equally exquisite small portraits. Thus the techniques used by Benninck in his illuminations are no different from those used in this self-portrait. A sloping easel was used for painting both portraits and more traditional subjects, such as the Madonna and Christ Child. Both illuminators and miniaturists worked by natural light and without magnification, although Benninck’s glasses hint at the strain of such intricate work" (http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74832/self-portrait-of-simon-bening-portrait-miniature-simon-bening/, accessed 01-23-2014).