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Because few illuminators read Latin, artists must have received directions, possibly from Laurent, about the subjects they should paint. In constructing these pictures, they adapted common workshop models that they had accumulated, which gave the antique stories a contemporary resonance. For instance, one of the two miniatures painted by the Virgil Master (fig. 2.3) employs models also used in a contemporary manuscript given to John of Berry ca. 1405, Jean Creton’s Livre de la prinse et mort du roy Richart d’Angleterre [Book of the Capture and Death of King Richard II] (BL Harley Ms. 1319). A comparison of the positioning, scale, and rendering of horse and rider in scenes from these manuscripts or of the treatment of architecture within them (compare figure 2.3 to figs. 2.4 and 2.5) reveals the use of shared models, but also differing levels of complexity of space and treatment of landscape. The Virgil Master Illuminator may have simplified his treatment of space in the illuminations of the Thebaid to harmonize with images painted by other artists in the manuscript.

While individual artists drew on their stock of models to realize scenes, someone like Laurent de Premierfait, who wrote the summaries and who knew Roman culture and the Latin text of Statius well, must have suggested the subjects and iconography of individual illuminations, which the artists then interpreted and visualized by drawing on fifteenth-century artistic conventions, as happened in the Virgil Master Illuminators’ representation of Mercury in the illustrations for both Plautus and Statius.

Sometimes artists drew on traditions of visual representation that were distinct from Statius to illustrate this manuscript. Both the Virgil Master Illuminator and an artist working in the style of the Master of the Ovide moralisée (fols. 104-105) gave the god Mercury special emphasis that went beyond the details of his appearance that Statius provided when describing Mercury’s reaction to Jupiter when he admonished Mercury to take a message to Laius (Thebaid 1.303-308): “Atlas’ grandson obeys his sire’s words and hastily thereupon binds the winged sandals unto his ankles and with his wide hat covers his locks and tempers the stars. Then he thrust the wand into his right hand…” The artists’ visual representations differ. In one of two illuminations that the Virgil Master contributed to the manuscript, he painted a scene (fig. 2.6) showing Juno kneeling before Jupiter at the council of the gods, to mark the beginning of the speech in which she begged Jupiter to change his mind about stirring up war between Argos and Thebes (Thebaid 1.248). Juno and Jupiter appear as a king and queen, and the other gods, with the exception of Mercury, wear exotic eastern dress and turbans. Mercury alone is distinctive among these lesser gods, probably because Juno, Jupiter, Pluto, and he were the only ones mentioned, but not described, in Laurent’s summary. In the illumination Mercury has an animalistic face, green wings sprouting by his ears, human hands, and scale-like fur on his legs, feet, and head, and he holds a staff. This formulation recalls that which the Virgil Master Illuminator used to illustrate Mercury in the contemporary frontispiece to Plautus’s Comedies (fig. 1.4) in which Mercury also has fur resembling scales on his hands and floppy canine ears.