Sunday, 8 February 2026

Cuttings of Initials from the 'Pontigny Bible', II


The 1958 Alan Thomas description shown in the previous post records that the two initials were 'From the Hachette collection', in which they were described 'as being English'. Without this lead, we would not have been able to deduce that lot 48 in the 1953 Hachette sale [1] were cuttings from this bible, and without the Hachette description we would also not have known that there are potentially four such cuttings, not just two: 

Sunday, 18 January 2026

Cuttings with Initials from the 'Pontigny Bible', I

In early November I watched an online presentation in which Agata Gazzillo briefly showed the image above [1]; I had a sense of recognition, so I took a quick snap with my phone.

Thanks to the caption, it was easy to track down the source: A. Racinet, L’ornement polychrome: cent planches en couleurs, or et argent, contenant environ 2,000 motifs de tous les styles, art ancien et asiatique, moyen âge, renaissance, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1869 [and later editions]), pl. 39.

Saturday, 3 January 2026

Gillyatt Sumner, John Mozley Stark, and Manuscripts from Erfurt

'G. Sumner, Woodmansey, 1856.'
[Source]

In the previous post we saw that a manuscript from Erfurt appeared, like many Erfurt MSS, in the 1836 von Bülow sale, before finding its way to Gillyatt Sumner. Both previous blogposts have images of Sumner's ownership inscriptions at the top, and both are dated 1856. Another manuscript, now in Paris, also has an ownership inscription dated 1856, shown above.