'Mirmellus Arnandi'

Among the bibles broken up by Otto Ege and/or Philip Duschnes is one often called the bible of 'Mirmellus Arnandi' (of which an example is shown above), produced in Paris c. 1300. Leaves were no. 14 in the famous Ege portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves.

The bible derives its name from the description of a cache of 210 of leaves sold at Sotheby's, 11 December 1984, lot 39: some of the leaves have erased inscriptions in formal gothic script the lower margin, and from those that remain partially legible, Christopher de Hamel concluded that the bible was 'Bequeathed to a Dominican Convent in 1450 by Mirmellus Arnandi, lawyer and judge', e.g. 'Ego mirmelus [sic] arnandi legum doctor et [...] Judex' on the leaf with the beginning of the book of Nahum.

Another Antiphonary Cutting from the Stroganoff Collection

A couple of weeks ago I looked at two early 16th-century Flemish miniatures from the Stroganoff Collection. In a blogpost in 2017 (with a postscript a week later) I identified a cutting from an early 14th-century Italian Antiphonary illuminated by the Master of the Brussels Initials, as being from the collection, and five years later, in 2022 I showed that other cuttings from the same manuscript were also probably once in his collection. I can add one more to the group.

The Illuminated Cuttings and Leaves of Victor Goldschmidt (d. 1933), of Heidelberg

The collection of illuminations (not to mention his complete codices, printed graphic arts, etc.) of Victor Goldschmidt [Wikipedia], of Heidelberg (shown above) is not well known. Perhaps the best known item in it was a miniature of St Gregory the Great, from an 11th-century Moralia in Job, which was published by Rosy Schilling, with a Foreword by Georg Swarzenski, Die illuminierten Handschriften und Einzelminiaturen des Mittelalters und Renaissance in Frankfurter Besitz (Joseph Baer, 1929) [PDF here], p. 3 no. 3 and Taf. IV, and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 

[Source]

Two More Miniatures from the Collection of Count Stroganoff

On several occasions in 2017 (here) and 2020 (here, here, and here) I blogged about illuminations from the collection of Count Stroganoff (shown above). In preparation for a visit to Stockholm next Spring, I have identified two more of his miniatures.

Hmmm ...

"Someone" has -- very tediously -- persuaded Google to remove (for a second time) my most recent blogpost. So let's just replace it with this (click the image to enlarge it):

The irony is delicious :-)

On the left is a book-review published in 2012; on the right, one of several editions of The Book of Hours of Louis De Roucy:

Sydney Cockerell on the Value of Provenance in Catalogue Descriptions

I have just encountered, for the first time, this letter from Sydney Cockerell [Wikipedia] to the Editor of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 30 no. 169 (April 1917), p. 154 [click the images to enlarge them]:

An Unpublished Illuminated Calendar from the Abbey of Montier-la-Celle

This and the following images are used
Courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
(CC-BY-NC-ND)

Interesting manuscripts can be found in unexpected places. At the CULTIVATE MSS conference in London a year ago [PDF programme], there was a presentation about the collection of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [Wikipedia], which was interesting but had very little to do with medieval manuscripts. One partly-medieval volume was mentioned and very briefly shown on screen, however, and after several months of emailing I was eventually able to get a complete set of images of the relevant part of it. One detail is shown above.