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Marie’s world is made up of pigments, calligraphic letters, brushes, and gold leaf delicately applied onto parchment. “I’ve always had a passion for the Middle Ages, but I didn’t necessarily imagine myself becoming a professional illuminator,” she says with a smile.
At 28, this young woman is one of the 60 or so professional illuminators in France, guardians of a craft thought to be extinct or jealously guarded by a few monasteries. But illumination didn’t stop at the abbey gates. Nor did it cease to exist when printing replaced copyist monks and secular manuscript production workshops.
Our world constantly cries out its need for “everything at once,” and the immediate and the ephemeral are king. In this context, illuminators distinguish themselves by practicing a craft where beauty exists for its own sake, patiently, in the silence of the workshops that replaced the scriptoria.
Illuminated copies, christening or wedding announcements… Marie Lefèvre spends her days working on commissions, her fingers stained with colored ink. It was during her history classes that she discovered the existence of this art form. However, she initially chose to study humanities, “which depressed me,” recalls Marie.
“I told my parents I wanted to draw, create, work with my hands. I was becoming unhappy.” Off she went to graphic design school. But Marie’s fingers weren’t made for tapping on keyboard keys, and her mind became muddled in front of the screen. “I really didn’t like working on a computer, even though I was good at sketching, drawing, and calligraphy… In short, anything that just required my hands and a pencil!” Because there’s no such thing as a calligraphy school, Marie landed somewhat by chance at the Angers school of illumination, and it was a revelation.
A tribute to Notre-Dame de Paris
Graduating in 2021, she set up her own business and launched her illumination studio in Angers in 2023. “I’m doing a job I’m passionate about, and one that’s extremely rare and ancient,” testifies the artist. “Being an illuminator is a kind of inner journey. It’s a job that’s so much a long term project that you understand why monks prayed when they copied,” she recalls. “Whether you are a believer or not, whether you practice a faith or not, you can’t deny the spiritual nature of this profession. Illumination is first of all about bringing sacred texts to light. It’s all about gesture and thought.”
On social networking sites, the young woman shares her time-consuming work with her 45,000 subscribers, who sometimes follow step-by-step the making of an illuminated manuscript. Marie made her follower count explode when she visually recounted a painful memory, immortalized in a marvelous blend of colors: the fire at Notre Dame de Paris.
“I’m a Parisian and I visited Notre Dame when I was little, on many occasions. I’ve always been fascinated by this structure built by human hands. When it burned down, I was shocked,” she recalls.
It was after watching Jean-Jacques Annaud’s documentary Notre-Dame brûle (Notre Dame burns) that she came up with the idea of an illuminated manuscript recounting this dramatic event. “I immediately had the image of what I wanted to do. A double-page spread of the cathedral in flames, watched by helpless passers-by.”
In all, it took 550 hours of work to achieve the final, breathtakingly delicate result. It’s impossible to put a price on it. “I don’t know how much I’d estimate, because I put a part of my soul into it. Every detail was thought out and executed with even greater meticulousness than anything I’ve ever done before,” the artist explains.
Requests are already pouring in, sometimes from the ends of the earth, to ask Marie for copies of this colorful marvel. And the original? “I don’t want to keep it for myself,” Marie explains. “My dream would be to have it exhibited… Maybe in the cathedral one day?”
And today we celebrate...