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 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:
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"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:
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]:
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| 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.
Anyone who has ever attempted to describe a manuscript will have faced the issue of terminology for describing script. Over the course of the last 75 years numerous books and articles have been written, and conferences held [1], discussing the issue, and yet we have still not arrived at any real consensus.
I think that two main drivers lay behind these publications and conferences, especially the earlier ones. One was to try to make palaeography more "scientific" (with implications of reliability and accuracy), and the other was to compensate for a lack of reproductions. It seems to me that the former was somewhat misguided [2], and the latter is now outdated [3].
If a series of Books of Hours are described as being mid 15th-century French, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Italian, then the knowledgeable reader will have a very good idea of what the script of each of them looks like, and how they differ from one another, without a formal description of their script. The same goes for an 11th-century biblical text, a 12th-century patristic text, a 13th-century academic text, a 14th-century legal text, a 15th-century Humanistic one, and so on. The date and place of origin, plus the type of text, is usually enough to indicate in general terms what the script looks like. No amount of description can ever convey its precise appearance – any attempt to do so is at best futile, and at worst misleading [4].
