The RECEPTIO-Rossi Affair III: My "Vendetta"

Rossi has published another document on her Academia.edu page, in which she refers to my "unjustified vendetta" against her. I therefore take an opportunity to respond to her main points, using her own headings. If any readers think I have failed to respond adequately to any of the claims in her document, please let me know.

1. Swiss National Science Foundation

She states that I claim that she has "received or perhaps continue to receive astronomical amounts of money from the Swiss National Science Foundation".

I have merely added up the amounts as published on the Swiss National Science Foundation's website. If I have made a mathematical error, it was not deliberate; I invite readers to check for themselves. I will willingly make a correction to my blogpost and apologise if I have made a mistake.

She writes: "Your statements are frankly ridiculous, or better, they are fake news. You have not yet realised that no member of RECEPTIO receives any salary from the SNSF."

I have never suggested that any member of RECEPTIO receives a salary from the SNSF.

She writes: "you claimed that I even earned 20,ooo Swiss Francs with the De Roucy Book of Hours. The truth is that this money covered part of the Open Access publication, which cost the publishing house much more"

I stated that she received a grant for this amount, because that is what is says on the website of the Swiss National Science Foundation. I do not know how the money was spent, but I stand by my opinion that the publication is a shoddy piece of work.

2. Your attempt to discredit me in the newspapers and at the University of Zurich

I have not attempted to contact any journalists, but several have contacted me. I have not given any of them an interview.

I have contacted a few email addresses at the University of Zurich, simply inviting them to read my original blogpost.

3. The picture of Andrea Murchio

She writes: "I find it sleazy that it was noticed by you or an associate or alter ego of yours that the name of Andrea Murchio, who died on Friday of a heart attack before a tennis match, was still listed on our site."

I have made no mention of Murchio on Twitter, in my blogs, or anywhere else, although I did re-tweet a thread written by someone else, whom I do not know. They (I do not even know their gender) are not "an associate or alter ego" of mine.

She ends: "I think that after all the falsehoods you have published, you should bring the discussion back to the level of adult and educated people."

If she can give me an example of a single falsehood I have published, I would be very willing to address it.

I will respond to the second part of Prof. Rossi's document, headed "Response to Mr Kidd's accusations on his blog", separately.

"Nobody cares about your blog!"

[Edit, 26 Dec. 2022, 9am: For anyone reading this for the first time, please note that a lot happened yesterday (Christmas Day) on Twitter, with many people contributing new information and insights concerning RECEPTIO. I will try to update the blog below later today [Edit: I have now done this], and will also aim to write another blog to document the reflect new revelations]

The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition (website here).

It comes at a very opportune moment, because this week marked the 10th anniversary of the week I started blogging fairly regularly: since December 2012 I have posted an average of about 45 blogs per year, and I was wondering how to mark this milestone. I hope that the following blog will provide some entertainment for the Christmas holidays!

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):

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 Breviary, Lucca, 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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:

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.

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"

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).

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

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]

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

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]

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.

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.

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".

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.