The History of Alexander the Great

This book reproduces in color all fourteen images from a fifteenth-century manuscript, now part of the J. Paul Getty Museum collection. One of the finest illuminated secular manuscripts produced in the Netherlands during the period, the manuscript features miniatures that illustrate important episodes from the short life of the legendary Macedonian general. Titled Les fais d'Alexandre le grant, the manuscript is itself a translation of a text attributed to first-century Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus, whose Latin text is one of our principal literary sources for our knowledge of Alexander. McKendrick's authoritative text places the Getty's manuscript in its contexts as history and art and explains how the text and illuminations have much to tell us as well about the politics and aesthetics of the Burgundian Netherlands and the development of secular culture in Western Europe.