Saturday 10 December 2022

Another Leaf from the MdM and AdM Hours Found

Regular readers will know that I have been trying to trace leaves from a late 15th-century Book of Hours with unusual initials "MdM" and "AdM" in some of the margins (see here, here, and here).

One that has so far eluded me was reproduced in Maggs Bros., Catalogue 437: Books of Art and Allied Subjects (1923), no. 1159 plate LXI (of which a detail is shown above):

Saturday 3 December 2022

A Breviary Written at Lucca in 1464

For a few years I have been aware of leaves of a Breviary (of which an example is shown above) which had a colophon with the name of the scribe, and the place and date of completion: Lucca on 22 December 1464. But searches for the terms BreviaryLucca, and 1464 produce surprisingly few hits for institutional websites: most of the search results are for online dealer listings. I hope this blogpost will make the manuscript better known and lead to new identifications.

Saturday 26 November 2022

An Anonymous Auction in Paris in 1934

In a previous blogpost about "Another Hachette-Lehman-Yale Cutting" (here) I referred to the catalogue of an auction held in Paris in 1934, to which I did not have access at that time. I have now seen a copy, and it adds to the group of cuttings discussed in that blogpost.

Catalogue des dessins, aquarelles,
gouaches, anciens et modernes, ...
enluminures des XIVe et XVe siècles,
appartenant à Madame X ...
15 décembre 1934

Sunday 20 November 2022

The Office of the Dead and the Iken Psalter

The Office of the Dead is a text whose overall format is pretty consistent, but whose details vary significantly, according to different liturgical "Uses". The Office can be found in several types of liturgical and devotional manuscripts, often appearing at or near the end of a Psalter, for example, and it is a standard feature of Books of Hours. It can be particularly helpful in establishing where a book was made (or at least where it was intended to be used) when the Hours of the Virgin are missing, incomplete, or correspond to a very widespread Use such as the Use of Paris or Rome. One might find, for example, a Book of Hours illuminated by Parisian artists, with a Parisian Use for the Hours of the Virgin, but an Office of the Dead for the Use of Troyes: a sure clue to the area where the patron lived.

Sunday 6 November 2022

The Source of the Composition of a Fake Drawing

I am helping to catalogue the collection of leaves and fragments owned by the late Marvin Colker, which will be sold at Christie's in about a month's time. The collection contains lots of interest, and I have at least one more blogpost in preparation about items from it. Today I provide a very brief one, concerning the drawing above.

Saturday 22 October 2022

Two More Leaves of the MdM and AdM Hours


In May I wrote a blogpost about two leaves from a Book of Hours which has the initials "MdM" and "AdM" -- presumably of its husband and wife owners -- in the borders; they are at Montreal and Rochester, NY. By chance I found another leaf from the same manuscript while in the US in July, in Toledo, Ohio, and wrote another blogpost about them after my return. In the second of these posts I reproduced a page from a 1923 Maggs Bros catalogue, in which four leaves of the manuscript are described, including the Toledo one. 

I have now found two more leaves, at least one of which is described in the Maggs catalogue. The two new leaves do not have the telltale initials "MdM" and "AdM" in their borders, but I am confident -- based on the style of script and decoration, and the number of lines per page -- that they come from the same manuscript.

Saturday 15 October 2022

A New Leaf of the Quadripartite Miniatures Series (Paris, c.1340)

Perhaps the most exciting discovery of my summer trip to various collections in NY, OH, and Toronto was a wealth of unknown or little-known material at the Royal Ontario Museum. Among many interesting illuminated cuttings and text leaves is the quadripartite miniature shown above, a previously unrecognised member of a group of miniatures now scattered between private and institutional collections including the Lilly, Bodleian, and British Libraries, Fitzwilliam Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Sunday 9 October 2022

Otto Ege's Limoges Missal (HL38)


The early 20th-century provenance of Otto Ege's Limoges Missal, leaves of which were no. 38 in his posthumous portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves, is already well established. Scott Gwara (Otto Ege's Manuscripts, 2013, HL38) records sales at Sotheby's, 26 March 1917, lot 799; American Art/Anderson Galleries, 20 January 1925, lot 288; and American Art/Anderson Galleries, 8 February 1926, lot 288.

Sunday 2 October 2022

Another Leaf of the Arrivabene Eusebius


Thanks to the kindness of Steven Galbraith of the Rochester Institute of Technology, I have just received images of some of the leaves I was unable to see in person while in Rochester this summer. They have all sorts of interesting items, but one in particular caught my attention, a detail of which is shown above.

A few years ago wrote a blogpost about "An Unnoticed Arrivabene Leaf at the Newberry Library" (here); it concerns one of two leaves formerly owned by Ernst F. Detterer (1888-1947) of Chicago, friend of Otto Ege, and now at the Newberry. I was unable to locate the second leaf, but I think it must be the one now at Rochester.

Saturday 17 September 2022

The Source of the Idea for the Lomax-Wade Collection?


 A very short post today, as I need to finish preparing my talk for next week's CULTIVATE MSS conference.

Regular readers may remember a series of posts about the "Lomax-Wade" collection of cuttings (here and following weeks): a collection of 120 illuminations (one of which is shown above) mounted on card and bound into a copy of Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (London, 1833):

"Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, extra-illustrated with one hundred and twenty cuttings from manuscripts [...]"

Although the book was published in 1833, this copy was in a binding signed by the noted London binder Charles Lewis, dated 1838.

I have recently discovered that in his catalogue for 1834, just a few years before the Lomax-Wade volume was bound, the London bookseller William Pickering offered some Italian illuminated cuttings for sale (doubtless from the Celotti collection, largely dispersed during the previous decade), recommending that they might be bound into a copy of Shaw's book!

"These original specimens would make an admirable addition to a copy of Mr. Shaw's Illuminated Ornaments."

Saturday 10 September 2022

More Ege Acquisitions from Dawson's Book Shop

Last week we looked at a manuscript sold by Dawson's Book Shop of Los Angeles, and broken up by Otto Ege (or perhaps Philip Duschnes). Today we'll look at a few more.

For the catalogue of French manuscripts in the collection of Bob McCarthy I traced eleven leaves with historiated initials from a Parisian Bible of about the 1330s  (of which a detail is shown above), and about sixteen more without historiated initials:

Saturday 3 September 2022

Dawson's of Los Angeles and Otto Ege's Aquinas (HL40)

[Photo by Mildred Budney]

One of the better-known and easily recognised ex-Ege manuscripts was a copy of Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, Book I, of which a leaf is shown above. Leaves from the manuscript are included as no. 40 in Ege's most famous portfolio: Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts, issued by his widow two years after his death in 1951.

Although Philip Duschnes of New York was apparently the first dealer to offer single leaves of the manuscript, it is likely that Ege was responsible for breaking it up: not only did he have enough leaves to include in his 1942(?) portfolio of Original Leaves from Famous Books, Nine Centuries as well as the posthumous Fifty Original Leaves portfolios, but a cache of 32 leaves from his collection was sold by his heirs at Sotheby's in 1985. The finest leaf of the manuscript was retained by the Ege heirs as part of the "Family Album", acquired by the Beinecke Library several years ago; if Duschnes had broken up the volume, he would doubtless have sold this leaf.

I wrote a blogpost about the provenance of the manuscript last year. We know that the volume was still intact in 1925-26 when offered for sale by the bookselling firm of Davis & Orioli, based in Florence and London. It was also still intact when owned by an "Unidentified American bookseller", but was broken by 1941, when Duschnes offered leaves in his Catalogue 48.

Saturday 27 August 2022

An Unnoticed 1834 Auction Catalogue

Yesterday I discovered an apparently unrecorded catalogue for an auction held at Dulwich, south London, by "Mr Shuttleworth". The front page of the 4-leaf catalogue is shown above; it mentions:

"several very beautiful 'MISSAL DRAWINGS' [...] from the Papal Sacristy [...] by the celebrated Miniaturist, Buonfratelli [...]"

Following the descriptions of lots 38-43 is the note that they:

"were spoils from the Papal Sacristy of the Vatican, at the last entry of the French into Rome, and were brought to England by the Abbate Celotti"

Saturday 20 August 2022

Manuscripts from the Collection of W. Charles Fewtrell


A couple of years ago (in this post) we looked at some of the illuminated cuttings, since dispersed, from an intersting album, and we later (in this one) identified the owner as W. Charles Fewtrell of Liverpool.

He also owned at least two albums of material relating to medieval manuscripts compiled by John Bradley, the author of important 19th-century works including A Dictionary of Miniaturists, Illuminators, Calligraphers and Copyists, with Reference to Their Works and Notices of Their Patrons ... (3 vols., 1887-89).

Saturday 13 August 2022

More Leaves from the MdM and AdM Hours

During my recent trip to the US I visited the Memorial Art Gallery of the Univeristy of Rochester (NY), and was able to examine the leaf of the Book of Hours which has the initials MdM and AdM in the borders, about which I wrote in this post

Saturday 6 August 2022

Initials from the Murano Gradual, Now at Reims

I have just found a clutch of a dozen more foliate minor initials from the Murano Gradual (about which I wrote in March, here) at the Musée Saint-Remi, Reims. It is notable that some of them are cropped right to the edges of the illumination, as in the example above; all twelve are shown below.

Saturday 4 June 2022

More About the Regensburg "GERWIRCH" Antiphonary

NYC, Morgan Library, MS M.870.2 [Source]

About four years ago I wrote a post in which I reproduced most of the leaves of a broken-up Antiphonary, and shared my discovery of a 1945 description of the intact volume, telling us more about it before its dismemberment.

I have now found an even earlier description of the complete volume, which supplies a few extra details.

Saturday 28 May 2022

Leaves from Cicero, De oratore, written in 1453

University of Rochester, D.460 1353-001 [Source]

In preparation for a manuscripts safari this summer, I am combing through online library catalogues of collections in New York state for manuscripts of interest. The Rush Rhees Library of the University of Rochester has an online handlist of its medieval and early modern manuscripts, for example, and one that particularly caught my eye is this:

 
The precise date "1353", suggests that the cataloguer knew something about the parent manuscript, and reminded me of Otto Ege's Dominican Missal dated 1353. As luck would have it, this is one of only two medieval manuscripts for which images are available online, so I was able to have a look; a whole-page view is shown above. 

Sunday 22 May 2022

MdM and AdM

 

Occasionally a provenance clue consists of the initials of the the forenames of the owner and his/her spouse, joined by a so-called "love-knot".

I recently noticed an example that has not two, but three initials, "M", "d", and "M", as above; here is the full page:

McGill University, MS 104

The presence of three initials struck me as odd, but I didn't give it any more thought.

Saturday 14 May 2022

Frederic Madden's Journal: The Rogers Sale

I have mentioned at least twice before the potential importance of distinguishing between the first day of a multi-day auction (which is how people usually cite auctions), and the day on which a particular manuscript was actually sold, as the latter could be several weeks later. One situation in which we may need to know the day on which a manuscript sold, is when we are trying to find references to it in things like personal diaries and journals, or newspaper reports. 

Many people are aware of the value of Sydney Cockerell's diaries (now at the BL) for finding out about auctions of the first half of the 20th century, but it seems that too few people use the journals of Frederic Madden for information about 19th-centuy sales.

Sunday 8 May 2022

"The School of Giotto"


One of the challenges of provenance research is interpreting catalogue descriptions when there is no accompanying image to verify the identity of a manuscript. The task would be simpler if catalogue descriptions were always accurate, but they sometimes contain typographical errors; sometimes written statements are open to different interpretations and are therefore ambiguous; sometimes cataloguers get things wrong in good faith; and they often get things wrong by being overly optimistic in their attributions.

Saturday 30 April 2022

Buyers and Prices at the Rogers Sale in 1856

[Source]

I have written several times about the need to locate multiple annotated copies of auction catalogues, because the annotations in any one copy cannot be trusted as reliable. And I have written (e.g. here) about the need to distinguish between the date on which a manuscript was sold and the date on which the auction commenced, because these are often not the same. In looking at the famous 1856 sale at Christie's of the collection of the poet Samuel Rogers (mentioned e.g. here), both these principles are exemplified, as will be discussed today and in next weekend's post.

Saturday 23 April 2022

"Dawkins"

It goes without saying that in order to trace the provenance of a manuscript (whether it be a codex, leaf, or cutting) from an auction to its subsequent owners, you need to identify who bought it at the auction. First, you usually need to find an annotated copy of the catalogue; then you need to be able to read the name of the buyer. If you are lucky, it will be a well-known and very distictive name, such as the dealers Quaritch, Dobell, or Colnaghi; or a collector like Cockerell, Riches, or Korner, each of whom is fairly easy to pursue further. Sometimes the name is only semi-legible or it is very common (Smith, Jones, etc.). Sometimes it is legible and reasonably uncommon, but unfamiliar; in this post I'll consider one such example.

Sunday 17 April 2022

The Lehman Archive at The Met Museum

[This, and all but the first of the next 9 images below, are from the
Robert Lehman papers, Robert Lehman Collection,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, boxes 73-76]

On my trip to the US before Christmas I spent a couple of days at the Watson Library of The Met Museum. My primarly purpose was to work through the files of the archive of Robert Lehman (1891-1969) [Wikipedia] relating to his collection of illuminations.

Sunday 10 April 2022

Unnoticed Leaves of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon

Latin Fragment D.1 (detail)
This and the following images reproduced by courtesy of the
Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham

I went to Birmingham last week to see the Crivelli exhibition. While in the city, I also went to The Barber Institute (to look at paintings, not manuscripts such as the Liberale da Verona cutting mentioned at the end of this post), and the University Library (because they have a very good set of Folio Society Collectors' Corner catalogues, some of which I have not been able to consult anywhere else), and the Cadbury Research Centre (Special Collections), which holds a large collection of little-known fragments. (And I do mean fragments, not cuttings and leaves). 

As usual, in my experience, about 90% of the fragments were unintersting to me (Canon Law, Sermons, Use of Sarum liturgica, etc.), but 9% are interesting and 1% are very interesting. One of the two or three items that comprise the 1% is an unrecorded portion of a copy of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon  Wikipedia], of which a detail is shown above.[1]

Saturday 2 April 2022

Cuttings by The Master of the Brussels Initials in the 1910 Stroganoff Catalogue?

In a previous post I showed that a cutting of an initial 'U' with St John the Evangelist by the Master of the Brussels Initials has the remains of the Stroganoff ink stamp on the reverse. Its dimensions were reported as 135×135mm when sold by Christie's in 2017. I suspect that it was lot 627 in the 1910 Stroganoff auction, and that the cataloguer mistakenly identified the evangelist as Luke instead of John:

"U. Ritaglio di corale decorato dalla figura dell'evange-lista Luca.
Contorno ed aureola dorata. Arte Umbra, secolo xv.
m. 0.13 × 0.13"
This hypothesis would be considerably strengthened if the preceding item, lot 626b, were the initial 'S' depicting St Stephen by the Master of the Brussels Initials, now belonging to The Met Museum, but the 1910 description is too vague to make a confident identification:
 
"S. decorata dalla figura di S. Stefano. Policromata e dorata"

One more cutting by the Master of the Brussels Initials, certainly from the Stroganoff collection (because it has his ink-stamp on the reverse), might have been lot 621:
"O. Ritaglio di corale, con l'effige del Salvatore in atto
di benedire. Aureola dorata. Arte Umbra del secolo xv.
m. 0.95 × 0.10"
At  c.135×100mm this cutting is significantly taller than it is wide -- but far less tall than the 950×100mm reported in the Stroganoff catalogue. An initial more than 9 times taller than it is wide and nearly a metre tall, however, is almost impossible to imagine, which suggests that the dimensions printed in the Stroganoff catalogue are the result of a typographical error. It is also notable that the initial above is an 'E', while the catalogue describes an 'O'; yet such a confusion is easy to understand.

So, it may be that all three, two, one, or none of the above initials are described in the Stroganoff catalogue, and the above comments are therefore rather speculative: there are problems with all three identifications. I try to avoid indulging in unsupported speculation, and have little patience for other scholars' work when it is insufficiently founded on firm facts, but in the present case I think that there is a balance of probability in my favour, because two of the three cuttings above were definitely in the Stroganoff collection, and all three of their subjects as reported in the 1910 catalogue, namely:
  • an initial 'U' with an Evangelist with gilded halo and surround, c.130×130mm
  • an initial 'S' with St Stephen, in colours and gold
  • a cutting of an initial from a choirbook, with Christ Blessing

Saturday 26 March 2022

The "Whitby" Psalter

As mentioned in the previous post, much of my earliest research on illuminated manuscripts concerned 13th-century English Psalters, and although I have not published much on the subject, I have always maintained an interest in them. I was therefore glad, several years ago, to be able to spend some time examining the so-called Whitby Psalter at the Houghton Library (of which an image is shown above).[1]

The Psalter is now very incomplete: the Houghton has a bound portion of just 28 leaves, but in the past several years I have found several more, and have long intended to do a blogpost. I found another recently, and this has spurred me into action.[2]

Sunday 20 March 2022

Otto Ege's Psalter with 'Aves' (HL116)

Many years ago, I worked on a group of early 13th-century English Psalters, some of which include a  hymn or series of prayers to the Virgin in which each stanza starts with the word "Ave". So I took special notice when, in 2014, I encountered at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a leaf from a later 13th-century (c.1270) Franco-Flemish example, with the "Ave" stanza before each Psalm, curiously enframed in illuminated ornament, as in the image above.

Sunday 13 March 2022

The Antiphonal of Berardo da Teramo in 1924

When I was in New York at Christmas I spent some time at the Watson Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mainly looking at the part of the Robert Lehman Archive pertaining to his illuminations. I'll be doing a separate post about it in due course, because it tells us a lot about when and where he acquired them, and explains the weird numbering of items that appears in de Ricci's Census.

Today I'll just highlight one provenance discovery that came out of this work, relating to the Antiphonary of Berardo da Teramo (of which an image is shown above), one of the most important illuminated manuscripts from Abruzzo, of the second quarter of the 14th century.

Sunday 6 March 2022

The Murano Gradual Initials [II]: The Minor Initials

There is a particular type of cut-out illuminated foliate initial which is found in many institutions, and of which examples appear on the market with some regularity. Once you have seen a few they are very easy to recognise, because although one may differ from another in their type of foliage, their formal and technical features are very consistent. The image above has been chosen to give a sense of their overall uniformity as well as variety of foliage-types (click the image to enlarge). Over the course of a couple of posts I intend to look at this large group of initials (I know of more than 200 of them [1]), and consider some questions they raise.

In 1994 Christopher de Hamel suggested that the initials came from the same manuscript as the well-known historiated initials cut from the Murano Gradual; he based this partly on details of their illuminated ornament, but mainly on the script of the text and music on their backs[2], and since then, they have regularly been described as having come from the Murano Gradual. The question of the parent volume has been addressed very recently. In 2019 Bryan C. Keene and Stephanie Azzarello offered some observations both for and against accepting de Hamel's proposal, but left the question open: 'further analysis of this entire group of illuminations is in order and will be part of a longer study'. In a recent article, having had the opportunity for further analysis, they concluded that "[the initials'] association with the Murano manuscripts does not seem likely", and pointing to evidence that "aids in disassociating De Hamel’s group of initials from the Murano series".

Saturday 26 February 2022

More Italian Illuminations from the Stroganoff Collection

In the April 1910 auction catalogue of the Stroganoff Collection (discussed in a recent post here), most of the descriptions are too imprecise or generic to make recognition possible, e.g. lot 614, an unidentified 15th-century Florentine half-length bishop-saint:

"D. Ritaglio di corale; effige di Santo Vescovo a mezzo
busto. Arte F[i]orentina secolo xv."

A few others describe more distinctive features, however, and I have therefore been able to identify a couple, and can thus add some previously unknown, or at least forgotten, provenance to them.

Saturday 19 February 2022

The Wildenstein "Mission to the Apostles"

Many of the historiated initials illuminated by the Master of the Murano Gradual depict saints or subjects whose identity is not in doubt, because they have distinctive attributes; an example is St Stephen, who was stoned to death and is therefore shown with a stone and a bloody wound on his head.

Many others do not include such attributes, and their identity is therefore uncertain. In some cases this may be because the cuttings come from the Common of Saints, and are thus deliberately intended to represent a generic martyr / bishop / confessor, etc., rather than a specific one.

But the subject of one illumination, a detail of which is shown above, is more perplexing than any other. It is one of a dozen illuminations by the Master of the Murano Gradual in the Wildenstein Collection at the Musée Marmottan, Paris. It is puzzling partly because it is so important: at about 540×365mm (c.21×14 inches) it is by far the largest illumination, and perhaps the only miniature (as opposed to a historiated initial) from the entire corpus of cuttings and single leaves attributed to the artist, usually thought to come from a dismembered volume of the multi-volume of Gradual of San Mattia, Murano. [1]

Thursday 17 February 2022

Count Stroganoff and The Missal of the Tailors' Guild of Bologna

Five years ago I had reason to try to track down a copy of the 1910 auction catalogue of Count Grigory Sergeievich Stroganoff (blog post here). Thanks to Francesca Manzari, and especially to Philine Helas of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, which holds one of the few recorded copies, I was able to get images of the relevant pages.

The cuttings I was searching for do not appear to be in the 1910 catalogue, but another interesting illumination was.

Sunday 13 February 2022

A Spanish(?) Initial Dated 1505

[Source]

The initial above sold at an auction in Barcelona last week. It is appealing, but I do not really know what to make of it. 

Saturday 5 February 2022

A Spanish Choirbook dated 1522

I usually do not pay much attention to 16th-century and later choirbooks, especially when their decoration is mediocre (as they usually are) but one caught my eye this week. It was sold at auction a few minutes ago [1].

Most of the 15 images online did not spark my interest, except the last.

Wednesday 2 February 2022

Bill Fagg and Methodology

[This midweek post comes from a long and growing list in my drafts folder]

My first job after leaving university was at Christie's, South Kensington (more-or-less next door to the building in which I was born, as I later discovered), where I worked in the Tribal Art Department [1]. It was the only time that I put my knowledge of Tribal Art to any use, and it introduced me to the fascinating world of art auctions and dealers.

William "Bill" Fagg (1914-1992), the legendary Africanist, was the Department's Consultant and was often in the office, so I had the pleasure of getting to know him before he died.

While searching JSTOR for somethign else, I came across a letter published by him [2], in which he relates that when he first did fieldwork in Africa in 1949, he had no specific training for it. But, he continues,

"I would here like to mention a qualification which I have for fieldwork -- though some would consider it a millstone around my neck. I mean a love of minutiae, nurtured during my studies in classical palaeography at Cambridge under the great Sir Ellis Minns. This is tied up with a pursuit of irrelevancies, real or imagined."

Two things strike me about these comments. One is that -- as I learned after a bit of Googling -- he had trained as a Classicist ("taking prizes for Latin hexameters and Latin epigrams") before doing a second degree in Archaeology and Anthropology. 

The other is the characteristically self-deprecating way in which he refers to his "pursuit of irrelevancies". It seems to me that we cannot really know what are irrelevancies and what are not, unless we pursue them.

The head of the Department, Hermione Waterfield, wrote a posthumous appreciation of Bill, in which she recalled,

"In spite of his slow speech and apparent torpor, Bill Fagg was a stimulating companion with a huge capacity to surprise. He also had a capacity to exasperate with his dilatory attitude [...] He explained to me that much of his apparent procrastination was due to his approach to problems, which was to eliminate the obscure possibilities before pursuing the more obvious."

This sounds to be an effective, but very counter-intuitive, method for arriving at unexpected conclusions missed by previous students of any subject or object -- including manuscripts. Too many people accept an obvious solution to a problem, and as a result do not consider less obvious ones.

Those who knew him will recognise her closing sentences:

"He often hoped to influence collectors to his view, sometimes taking a contrary position to enforce a point he felt was misunderstood: he could be self-indulgent on occasion, giving way to flights of fancy, but in prose that was so well crafted he had to be forgiven. In the end all who knew him had to admit, often through clenched teeth, that he was a great man."


Notes

[1] "Tribal Art" may seem to be a perjoritive term now, but it described the cultural context in which most of the Department's art was created; alternate terms, such as "non-Western Art" and "World Art" have their own problems.

[2] African Arts, 19, no. 4 (August, 1986), p. 77.

For further biographical information, there is an obituary here.