ABSTRACT
The Yale manuscript, containing Agravain, Queste and Mort Artu, is among the least known of the densely illustrated copies of the five-part prose Lancelot that enjoyed a huge wave of popularity in northern France and surrounding territories from the 1220s to the end of the fifteenth century. The chronological evolution of Lancelot-Graal picture-cycles are a matter whose development is not just one that moves in a sequential pattern from simple to complex. The decisions about whether the picture-cycle of the model would be abandoned, reduced, or expanded in any one particular copy were obviously made at the planning stage, before or during the copying of the text. The Master Painter did most of the illustration in both but was assisted in both by a second artist whose work occurs sporadically in BN, fr. The third hand in the Florence manuscript stands somewhat apart from the rest and finds its closest parallel in the Paris Guillaume de Tyr, BN, fr.
