Around the turn of the first millennium, Dudo of Saint-Quentin was commissioned to write the first dynastic history of Normandy and its ruling family. His patrons were the Norman rulers residing at Rouen, namely Richard I and his son and successor, Richard II. The proud result of this transgenerational relationship between the ducal family and their first ‘official’ or ‘house historian’ was the Historia Normannorum (HN), which Dudo presented to the Norman court in or shortly after 1015. Scholars have paid much attention to the intricate textual relationships which governed the HN’s literary composition, successfully scrutinizing its similarities to works as diverse as Virgil’s Aeneid, the Scandinavian sagas and Normandy’s local hagiographical traditions. Stylistically, the HN owes a great deal to models of secular Latin literature inherited from the Roman and Carolingian empires, comprising both prose and poetry, which together provided Dudo with a strong notion of translatio imperii and served strategically to place the work’s Norman protagonists within the succession of great kings, emperors, martyrs, and even venerated saints. Notwithstanding the ample amount of knowledge which previous scholarship has cultivated with regard to the HN’s historical and literary contexts, there is, however, a paucity of research dedicated to exploring the work’s manuscript tradition. When Dudo’s work first appeared in print during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, no more than two manuscripts were used by André Duchesne for the text’s edition. Jules Lair set out to amend this situation in 1865 for the publication of De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum. Lair, in turn, opted to consult merely seven out of fifteen manuscripts which are known today, thus leaving it to Gerda Huisman to make the first serious attempt at collating the HN’s entire manuscript tradition in 1983. As I have shown elsewhere, Huisman’s study, though pioneering at the time of its publication, needs to be treated with caution. The two most disputable arguments of Huisman’s article concern, on the one hand, the relevance of the HN’s metrical poems, which she considered secondary to the prose text, and, on the other, her dismissal of the work’s potential for illumination in the form of miniatures. Contrary to Huisman’s arguments, which scholars have embraced for almost thirty years, the present study aims to demonstrate that the HN was conceptualized, from the very outset, as an illustrated chronicle or ‘chronicon pictum’.