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.

I studied the group in detail for the catalogue of the McCarthy Collection, which includes five miniatures from the series, expanding and correcting some details of the description by Christopher de Hamel of the Lilly Library leaf. [1]

One of the miniatures in the McCarthy collection has the end of a Christological cycle (Ascension and Pentecost, followed by the Coronation of the Virgin, numbered in the margins XXXVIII-XL), and King David. This makes it all but certain that this cycle of miniatures prefaced a Psalter:

Numbered captions identify each scene, e.g. "Comment il monta es cielx le jour de lascension. xxviij" and "Comment il envoie le saint esperit a ses apostres le jour de penthecoste. xxxix.".

Notice that the sequence of scenes (confirmed by the large marginal numbers in blue and red), is top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right.

Some of the miniatures have been cropped so that they no longer have numbers or captions, although in this case the subjects are clear, and it is apparent that (as with other miniatures of the series) the scenes should be read top before bottom and left to right (The Maries at the Sepulchre, The Torments of Hell, The Harrowing of Hell, and Noli me tangere):

In addition to this Christological series, there is a sequence of eighteen leaves with 72  miniatures (out of an original 78, three or four to page), depicting the Old Testament story of Joseph. There is also a series of scenes concerning saints, mainly New Testament episodes from the lives of Sts Peter and Paul, but ending with four scenes from the life of St Denis (which is appropriate because the manuscript was made in Paris -- not Metz as has usually been stated in the past). Each of the three series has its own set of numbering, and the likelihood is that they marked three divisions of the 150 psalms, prefacing Psalms 1, 51, and 101.

The Toronto miniature clearly belongs to the Lives of Saints series, but the precise subject-matter is not immediately easy to determine because it has had its margins and their captions cut off. Working top to bottom and left to right, the first scene appears to show St Peter (with keys and apparently tonsured or bald on top of his head) and another saint (young and beardless, so possibly St John the Evangelist), being thrown into prison by a mob, one of whom wields a club:

The second scene shows (the same?) two saints looking at a man who is apparently dropping dead while holding a money(?)-bag:

The third shows the same two saints being brought before a group of men wearing Jewish(?) headgear:

The fourth shows the body of a dead man (apparently the same one as in the second scene) being carried by two young men.

The subjects of these scenes have puzzled me for some time, which is partly why I have not blogged about them before, but I think I now have the solution.

The most famous occasion when St Peter was imprisoned is recounted in Acts, chapter 12: Herod imprisons him and an angel frees him during the night. But the other three scenes in the miniature do not seem to correspond to any of the events surrounding this imprisonment. 

But in Acts 4 we read that Sts Peter and John angered "the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees", who "laid hands on them, and put them in hold unto the next day: for it was now eventide". The next day they were brought before the high priest and others, who could find no reason to punish them and therefore had to let them go. It seems to me that these events may be depicted in the two scenes on the left of our miniature:

Acts 4 ends with Sts Peter and John converting people, who each sell their property and donate the proceeds to the apostles for redistribution to the needy:

"for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need."

The beginning of the next chapter, Acts 5, continues with a little-known story:

"a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price [...] But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? [...] And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost [...]. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him."

It seems to me likely that this is the subject of the two scenes on the right of our miniature:

The story in Acts 5 continues with Ananias's wife, Sapphira, suffering the same fate: she denies to St Peter that they kept back part of the money from the sale of their property, and as a result of her lie she too drops dead. Her death is the first of four scenes in a miniature at the Art Institute, Chicago, as described in its caption "Comment la fame Ananie chei morte devant S. Pierre parce quelle avoit menti ansi que son mari":

The other three scenes on this leaf show men cured by St Peter's shadow (numbered X), St Peter put in prison (XI) and St Peter freed from prison by an angel (XII), from Acts 12, as mentioned above. Note that the the two left scenes precede the two right scenes, just as I have proposed for the new Toronto miniature.

Most of the known single miniatures do not have a provenance earlier than the 20th century, but the British Library series was acquired between 1854 and 1860. We know that the parent volume was probably broken up at least a few decades earlier,  however, because one of the miniatures is inserted into a printed volume that was owned by Richard Heber [Wikipedia], who died in 1833, acquired by the Bodleian in 1834:

Bodleian Library, Auct. 7Q inf. 2.9

Notes

[1] Peter Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, III: French Miniatures (London, 2021), no. 80.  Christopher de Hamel, Gilding the Lilly: A Hundred Medieval and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Lilly Library (Bloomington, 2010), no. 43.