A 13th-Century Peter Lombard now in Liverpool

This week's post is really just a series of observations, followed by a puzzle to which I hope a reader might be able to offer a solution.

Some months ago I went to Liverpool, and among the manuscripts I wanted to see was a very fine copy of Peter Lombard's Gloss on the Psalms, produced probably in Oxford in the early 13th century. It is well known, having been catalogued by George Warner when owned by Dyson Perrins, and having been included in Nigel Morgan's Survey of Early Gothic English Illumination [1].

It is an extremely handsome volume, with wide margins, as can be seen in the image above; here is a close-up of one of the historiated initial:

 

Most of the modern provenance is represented on the front pastedown (above), where we see the bookplate of a previous owner, "Thomas Brooke F.S.A. | Armitage Bridge" (1830–1908), and the inscription of his nephew,  "W[illiam] Ingham Brooke [1862-1923] | Barford Rectory | Warwick | 1908"  [2], below which is the bookplate of Charles William Dyson Perrins (1864-1958), who had acquired it at the Brooke sale at Sotheby's, 7 March 1913, lot 11.

 

 

The upper right corner of the same pastedown, and the top of the spine, also have Dyson Perrins's circular label, inscribed with his manuscript number "9":

 

The manuscript was in the Perrins sale at Sotheby's, 29 November 1960, lot 103, where it was bought by Quaritch for £4,000. Quaritch's price codes and inventory number are on the back pastedown:

 

Liverpool Public Library bought it from Quaritch nearly five years later, and they recorded the purchase price in code, as "£cjap":

Now for the puzzle. Above the Beatus initial on the first page is a cartouche containing letters and a shield. 

In past descriptions this has been described as 15th century, but it looks to me -- based on the letter-forms -- that it is contemporary with the rest of the illumination:

The first part has been read in the past as "OR[ATI]O BO[N]A", but this does not look right to me; the letters look to me more like: O R T E C(?) and A:

 

My reading may certainly be wrong, but I cannot read the "E" as a "B", for example, and there is no abbreviation mark over the following letter, as we would expect if it were "BOA" and intended to represented "BO[N]A".

As we have seen in a few recent posts, it is always worth looking at the back of a leaf to see if the pigments/metals/bole have left clear marks, and in this case they have:

If we flip the image horizontally and enhance the contrast etc., we get something like this, which is perhaps easier to read than the side with reflective gold:

The letter-forms seem to me very unlike what I would expect if they were 15th-century, and are fundamentally the same as those used for gilt incipits within the main body of the text, e.g. here:

The second part of the cartouche has the letters "L" and "G" either side of a shield, and is presumably a clue to the identity of an owner -- or of the original patron if I am right about its date. If there was a charge painted on the gold ground it has all flaked off, but perhaps someone can interpret it?

 

[Update, 21 April 2023:] 

Alex Day, of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, has sent me an intriguing suggestion. He agrees that the cartouche looks 13th-, not 15th-century, and appears to read ORTECA or perhaps ORTEGA -- which sounds Spanish -- but he further points out that the 19th-century binding is probably Spanish, and the volume contains no obvious evidence of having been in England after its manufacture. He therefore wonders if the book found its way to Spain and had the cartouche and arms added there?

Notes

[1] A Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Printed Books Collected by Thomas Brooke, F.S.A., and Preserved at Armitage Bridge House, Near Huddersfield, II: M-Z (London, 1891), p. 541 (ill.).

George Warner, Descriptive Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Library of C. W. Dyson Perrins, D.C.L., F.S.A (Privately printed at the University Press, Oxford, 1920), no. 9.

Günther Haseloff, Die Psalterillustration im 13. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Geschichte der Buchmalerei in England, Frankreich und den Niederlanden (Kiel: Inaugural-Dissertation, 1938), pp. 13-18, 100.

Sotheby & Co, The Dyson Perrins Collection, Part III: Catalogue of Fifty-Nine Illuminated Manuscripts ..., 29 November 1960, lot 103 (ill.).

Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts [I]: 1190–1250, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 4.1 (London: Harvey Miller, 1982), no. *** .

[2] Sir Thomas died without an heir, but was the eldest of five brothers; William Ingham Brooke was a son of one of these brothers, Joshua Ingham Brooke (1836-1906).