Boerner Auction CX, Addendum

Following on from a recent post, I have realised that lot 51 in the Boerner catalogue, later lot 32 in the Lanna-Prag catalogue, was later owned by Edouard Kann and Robert Lehman, and is now in The Met, NYC, where all this provenance is recorded.

[Source]

But, to judge by their online description, The Met is apparently unaware that another of its leaves was also in the Boerner auction, as lot 17, where it was attributed to 13th-century France:

Like the Psalter leaf now at Harvard, it was apparently unsold in the auction, and re-offered by Boerner in a fixed-price catalogue the following year:

It was given to The Met in 1939 by Sarah Gibbs Thompson Pell, and is now attributed to Swabia, c.1400:

[Source]

The priest's scroll reads:

"Prespiter Albert(us) hui(us) libri tibi munus. | Dat pia virgo p(re)ces p(ro) me peto ferte sorores"

And the nun's reads "Mater mis(eri)c(or)die miserere mei. Liugardi."

The Met description and a web-search suggest that the leaf is unpublished, apart from the Boerner catalogues, which is surprising for such an interesting and unusual miniature.

A Little-Known Manuscript Dated 1471, made for Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara

Rather than attempt a full blog-post this week, I will just link to one that I wrote for the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, that was posted online yesterday.

Boerner Auction Catalogue CX, 1912

On a couple of occasions in past blogs I have referred to the catalogue of an auction held in Leipzig in November 1912 by C.G. Boerner.

A Postscript to: A Psalter Leaf at Harvard

A few months ago I wrote a post about a leaf at Houghton Library, with a miniature of the Baptism of Christ on one side and a Beatus initial on the other, in which I identified it as one of the leaves sold anonymously by Gustav Nebehay at Sotheby's in 1926.

Only later did I realise that this conflicted with the account of its provenance as published in 2010, which implies a direct line of ownership to Houghton from an auction in 1912, with no mention of the 1926 auction:

"Sold at auction in Munich in 1912 to Edgar Huidekoper Wells (1875-1938), it was acquired by George J. Dyer for the Fogg Art Museum (1927.21) before being transferred to Houghton Library in 1990"

with a footnote detailing the 1912 auction: C.G. Boerner, Leipzig, Auction CX: Manuscripte und Miniaturen des XII. bis XVI. Jahrhunderts, Handzeichnungen des XV. bis XVII. Jahrhunderts, Versteigerung ... 28. November 1912, lot 15; the image above is taken from this catalogue.

Descriptions of One Manuscript or Two?

[Digital Library@Villanova University; Source]

One of the challenges of tracing a manuscript from owner to owner is to verify that it is indeed a single manuscript whose path you are following, not two or more similar ones. We can exemplify this problem by looking at the catalogue descriptions of the Villanova manuscript discussed in a recent post.

A 12th-century Cistercian Missal Formerly Owned by Otto Ege

Leaves from one of the manuscripts dispersed by Otto Ege which are most easily recognised are from a Cistercian Missal, long thought to be French or Spanish. A group of four including this leaf, for example:

was attributed in Sotheby's, 25 April 1983, lot 16, to "probably France (possibly Spain)":

The Duprat Bible [Part II]

The previous post left the Duprat Bible in the 1724 catalogue of the Château d'Anet.

Whoever bought the Bible divided each volume into two and rebound them in the present 18th-century bindings, for an unidentified owner, with a gilt “P L” (? or "L P" ?) monogram stamp in each corner:

A Fourth Leo X Cutting

I'm too busy to do proper blog-posts at the moment, but here's a recent find, relating to the previous posts here, here, and here.

From Maggs, European Miniatures and Illumination: Bulletin No.6 (London, n.d. [between 1966 and 1971]), no.44

von Scherling's Roman de Troie Miniatures

A week ago I mentioned and illustrated a pair of full-page miniatures from the earliest illuminated manuscript of the Roman de Troie, which were offered for sale, with the two shown above, by Erik von Scherling in his Rotulus catalogue, vol.IV (1937), no.1817:

Ege's 12th-Century Italian Lectionary

Looking through Erik von Scherling's Rotulus catalogue vol.IV (Winter, 1937) for the previous post, I came across a plate depicting a very familiar-looking manuscript:

Erik von Scherling (1907–56) and Rotulus

Rotulus, vol.IV, no.1871 [Source]

Erik Edzard Floris Folkard von Scherling was the younger son of the Swedish Consul at Rotterdam, where he was born on 20 May 1907. When he left school he went to work for the bookseller Jacob Ginsberg in Leiden, where he specialised in Oriental books, and learnt Latin and Arabic.

Another Soranzo MS, now in Philadelphia

Browsing images of manuscripts at the Free Library, Philadelphia, I recently came across another unrecognised manuscript (Lewis E 219) formerly owned by Giacomo (alias Jacopo) Soranzo, with the distinctive foliation described in a previous post:

The Beauvais Missal: A New Piece of the Provenance

Of all the manuscripts said to have been cut up by Otto Ege and now scattered around the world, none is as instantly recognisable as the Beauvais Missal, and perhaps none was as valuable when still intact. And yet, despite the lively interest in Ege and his manuscripts in recent decades, no one seems to have found out where he got it from.

A Miniature from the Loredan Hours in Los Angeles

LACMA exterior (from Google streetview)

A recent visit to LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) led to some nice surprises. One was the discovery of another of the missing miniatures from the so-called Loredan Hours, about which I wrote previously.

It has a pope, cardinal, king, and layman kneeling before God in heaven, and illustrates a suffrage for Peace:

Los Angeles, LACMA, 58.62.1, verso

A Dismembered Italian Ferial Psalter

Those of you who subscribe to the Manuscripts on My Mind (MoMM) Newsletter (and if you don't, I recommend that you do) will know about St Louis University, MSS 55a and 55b; Susan L'Engle brought attention to these two leaves in MoMM issue 8 (PDF here):

A Dispersed Copy of John of Wales's Communiloquium

Leaves of a fine copy of the Communiloquium or Summa Collationum of John of Wales (alias John Waleys / Joahnnes G[u]allensis) are to be found in a wide variety of collections, and they occasionally appear on the market.

One framed leaf, at Occidental College, provides information about their provenance, otherwise unavailable.

On the back of the frame is an old typescript label:

A Leaf of Pietro Ursuleo's Psalter-Passion Sequences in Eagle Rock

The small collection of medieval leaves in Special Collections in the Library at Occidental College in the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles has yet more interesting items to offer.

Among them is a leaf from a Psalter with Passion Sequences, written by the humanistic scribe Pietro Ursuleo of Capua (d.1483).

The recto contains the text of Psalms 58:11-18:

and the verso continues with the last two words of Psalm 58; a long titulus to Psalm 59; and the text of Psalm 59:1-10:

A Leaf from a Fine English Psalter, c.1200

Occidental College has an extremely appealing leaf of an English Psalter of circa 1200, containing Psalms 20:1-21:6:

The fact that the Psalm 21 initial is enlarged (three lines in height, instead of Psalm 20's two-line height) suggests a Benedictine connection: Psalm 21 was one of the Benedictine divisions of the Psalms, being the first Psalm said at Matins on Sundays.

The leaf recognisably comes from a very handsome but somewhat defective volume of 129 leaves offered by Maggs Bros., Catalogue 1262: Illuminated Leaves and Historical Documents  (Christmas, 1998), item 7, and again in European Bulletin, no.23: Illuminated Miniatures, Manuscripts, and Single Leaves 1000-1900 A.D., Catalogue 1366 [December, 2004], item 1, with a colour reproduction:

The Maggs description reports that it was previously Christie's, 2 July 1975, lot 290, when it had "140 leaves (including one replacement leaf at the beginning)".

Of the leaves that had been removed from the volume between 1975 and 1998 were:

• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 12, no. 25
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 13 (July 1986), nos. 32, 33
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 15 / Catalogue 1103, no. 55
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 22 / Catalogue 1249 [April 1998] no. 4, with reproduction. Pss.17:39-18:7
• Sotheby's, 17 June 1997, lot 20 (a)

EDIT 25 April 2014

I have just noticed that the volume was sold at Sotheby's, 23 June 1998, lot 45, with a description listing several single leaves that had been extracted since 1975.

Ege Leaves at Occidental College

The Ege leaves in the Occidental College collection include:

• Psalter; France, mid-13th century
• Gwara HL10
• Psalms 119:136-154
• Apparently with a pencil folio number "14"
• de Ricci, Census, II, p.1938–9, no.12, tells us that Ege had bought the manuscript in 1922 from Adler, Munich, and that before disbinding it it had only 82 leaves, containing Pss.70-150 and canticles, misbound.
• Despite being correctly attributed to France by de Ricci, Ege attributed it to Germany

A Fragment formerly owned by Guilford and Phillipps, part II

[Continued from this post]

Looking at the original Phillipps auction catalogues from 1903 and 1911 it was possible to locate the following entries:

"858  Novum Testamentum. Pars Expositionis Bedæ in Actus Apostolorum, manuscript of the tenth century, written in double columns, on vellum, with the book-plate of Lord Guilford, half morocco                     folio X Cent"

and

"71  Bedæ Expositionis in Actus Apostolorum Fragmentum, manuscript of the eleventh century, written in double columns, on vellum, with the book-plate of Lord Guilford                                                         folio XI Cent"

In the 1903 sale it was bought by "Brewer" (or perhaps Bremer?) for £1, and in 1911 by J[acques] Rosenthal for £4 5s. Presumably Brewer/Bremer failed to pay for the item, or returned it for re-sale.

This tells us that the manuscript was a bound volume until at least 1911, although incomplete, and that there was definitive proof of having come from the Guilford library, as suggested by the Phillipps catalogue at no. 10614.  This description does not mention that the manuscript was a fragment, so the "fragm." of the first description indicated that it was an incomplete codex. The Schoenberg database does not include single leaves, however old or interesting, but it does include incomplete codices, and the present item can be found there by searching with "Bede" as author and "Guilford" in the Provenance field (I prefer to use the old interface, which is much more user-friendly than the "improved" one).

As usual, the results of searching the Schoenberg database are very hit-and-miss (hits often turn out to be misses), but two are correct:

Payne & Foss, Catalogue of Manuscripts, Books Printed on Vellum ..., February 1830, item 1053:

"1053  Bedae, (Venerabilis,) Expositio in Actum Apostolorum. A very ancient Manuscript of the Twelfth Century upon vellum, in double columns, from Lord Guilford's Collection, 3l. 3s     --     --    --     folio"

R.H. Evans, Valuable and extensive library of the late Earl of Guilford, Part the Third, 28 February, 1829, lot 410:

"410  Venerabilis Bedæ Expositionis in Actum Apostolorum, A VERY ANTIENT MANUSCRIPT, ON VELLUM"

A marginal note in ink in the catalogue "α/o/o" indicates that there was a reserve of £1 on the lot; it was bought by Thorpe for £1 3s.

Thus we have confirmed that the manuscript comes from the collection of Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford (1766-1827) part of whose library was sold in auctions from 1828 to 1835.

Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford. © National Portrait Gallery, London