Illustrating Lancelot and Guinevere

There can be little doubt that the best-known image in Arthurian art is the first kiss of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Morgan copy of the Lancelot propre, ¹ the central branch of the vast five-part prose romance, known as the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Graal, that held so prominent a place in the book-box or on the bookshelf of the French aristocracy between about 1220 and 1475 (figure 1). ² Already the frontispiece to the Loomises’ pioneering study of Arthurian art published in 1938, ³ a detail of this embracing couple was selected in the 1990s for the front of the leaflet inviting the public to join the Friends of The Pierpont Morgan Library, and has for several decades also been sold as one of the Library’s bookmarks. So familiar has the image become that it is easy to forget that the first kiss as such is most unusual in the iconographical tradition of the Lancelot-Graal, and, when it does occur, it displays a number of peculiarities. ⁴