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| Houghton Library, MS Typ 496 [Source] |
A reader sent me an enquiry about a manuscript a few weeks ago, that sent me off on a provenance-hunting trail with a very satisfactory result. The image above shows the last page of the manuscript, a copy of Andrea Domenico Fiocchi (alias Fenestella), De Romanorum Magistratibus, which is at the Houghton Library, and this is a detail, showing that the scribe dated its completion in 1465:
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| "die .v. novembr. 1465" |
Six months ago I speculated about the identity of the owner of a group of Italian illuminated cuttings sold at a previously-unremarked sale at Sotheby's in 1821, suggesting "that it was either (i) someone who had bought the cuttings from Celotti, or (ii) Celotti himself", giving reasons for preferring the second possibility.
A significant number of those lots were bought by Ottley, yet re-appeared four years later in the famous sale of Celotti's illuminations at Christie's; I therefore suggested that Ottley and Celotti were acting in partnership to ensure that lots achieved respectable prices.
More recently I looked at the question of who actually owned the illuminations at the 1825 "Celotti" sale, and concluded that it probably was Celotti -- rather than Ottley as Christopher de Hamel has suggested.
This week I will reconsider the question of who consigned the illuminations for sale in 1821.
I have for several years known the above cutting, which was until recently in a distinguished south London private collection.
I don't think that I had ever heard of Stephano Bardini [Wikipedia] until Laura Zabeo kindly told me that a couple of the illuminations in the collection of Rodolphe Kann had previously belonged to Bardini, and I was able to update their provenances and current whereabouts accordingly in this blogpost.
Laura also kindly sent me images of the relevant pages of Everett Fahy, L'Archivio storico fotografico di Stefano Bardini: Dipinti, disegni, miniature, stampe (Florence, 2000). This includes (pp. 62-64) a list of 30 illuminated cuttings and leaves, and a codex (numbered 692-723), of which photos exist in the Bardini photo archive.
The present location of some is recorded, but the whereabouts of most were not known to Fahy. In two or three posts I will therefore try to identify as many as possible so that his collection will be better known, and so that current owners can add him to the provenance of their own items. I will start with the ones for which Fahy was able to identify the later provenance, and next week turn to some of those that are harder to trace.
I mentioned last week that -- until I got side-tracked -- I intended to discuss some ideas put forward by Christopher de Hamel in the Introduction to the Burke Collection catalogue.
I received a copy of the Burke catalogue on 11 February, less than a week after its official 5 February publication-date, and by a curious coincidence of timing this was just four days after I wrote a blogpost about possible collaboration between Ottley and Celotti when selling illuminated cuttings, a subject addressed in the Introduction.
Regular readers will know how often the backs of leaves and cuttings provide vital information. There may be a significant attribution (e.g. "From the Cathedral at Como"); a direct indication of a former owner (e.g. notes initialled "TMW" by Thomas Miller Whitehead); an auction lot number that allows it to be identified in a sale catalogue; text and/or music that allows the ambiguous subject-matter of an initial to be identified; or traces of a characteristic type of adhesive mounting-tape, that reveals it to have been sold by Otto Ege.
This week, I started to write a note about some interesting ideas presented by Christopher de Hamel in the Introduction to the recently published catalogue of the Burke Collection [1], but I quickly became side-tracked by his discussion of a cutting from Santa Maria degli Angeli, shown above.
"It is not clear why a monk of the Cistercian abbey of Kaiserheim, in Bavaria, might write a manuscript for a nunnery in Zurich, about 260km to the south-west"
