Wildenstein Cuttings and Leaves Now Online

[click to enlarge] [source]

I have lots of blogposts in my draft folder, but all require some more work before they are ready to make public. One concerns the initials of the Murano Gradual, and in the process of compiling it, I found that the Musée Marmottan Monet, which owns a dozen historiated initials and a full-page miniature, have digitised the collection within the past year or so and put them online. This seems like something worth sharing now.

The collection can be viewed here: www.marmottan.fr/collection-en-ligne/ You can get the illuminations by doing a "Recherche simple" on "Wildenstein", or go to "Recherche avancée", click "Domaine", and select "enluminure" from the drop-down list.

The detail above is a sample of the quality of some of them (others have been scanned to a less high standard, unfortunately). But the less good ones can be significantly improved with image-editing software, e.g. from this:

to this:

 

One thing that the new images do not show, unfortunately, is the relative sizes of the cuttings, and the way in which they are framed: