One More Montbaston Bible Historiale Cutting

In previous posts (especially here, but also here, and here) I have discussed cuttings from a 14th-century Bible historiale with miniatures attributed to Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston, who who worked in Paris in the second quarter of the 14th century. At least two or three of them were previously owned by Robert Forrer.

In this post I observed that a significant number of items in the 1921 sale of the collection of Rudolf Busch of Mainz had previously belonged to Forrer. Looking at the Busch catalogue again I noticed the cutting shown above.

A Byzantine Miniature on a Leaf from the Forrer Collection

A forthcoming Koller sale has a leaf from a copy of the Gospels in Greek, with the above miniature (24 March, lot 503). 

As the catalogue description expains, the parent manuscript is now Chicago, University Library, MS 129 (de Ricci, Census, I, p. 568). It preserves one miniature, and a colophon from which we know that it was written by Nikolas of Edessa in 1133. 

At Home With Robert Forrer in 1937

[Source]

By chance I recently came across an article about Robert Forrer (who has been mentioned in several previous posts, e.g. here): Jean R. Debrix, ‘Visages d’Alsace: M. Robert Forrer’, La vie en Alsace (1937), pp. 132–36.

This includes seven photographs of the interior of Forrer's home, on the walls of which hang framed manuscript leaves and cuttings, including the one above, and these two:

Looking closely, I recognised an old friend.

Cuttings by the Monza Master [II]

Despite having written in the previous post about the flimsiness of the relationship between the initials by the Monza Master, and the choirbook in Cracow into which some of them as stuck, it is worth looking more closely at the volume as a whole.

Cuttings by the Monza Master [I]

In the past few weeks the first volume of the catalogue of the McCarthy collection has been published [1]. The collection includes a series of 19 cuttings from a volume of Lives of Saints illuminated by the so-called Master of Monza, and the catalogue lists 27 more cuttings in other collections, making a total of 46. Two of the 46 should not be on this list, however, and two other ones should be.

The Dispersal of the Forrer Collection (and a Postscript on the Arenberg Psalter)

Many of the leaves and cuttings I encounter can be traced back to the collection of Robert Forrer, who we have encountered in several previous posts. I know that he sold individual items, as well as substantial collections, to Museums. In 1899, for example, he sold a collection of 1,200 specimens of early textiles to the V&A Museum. But I cannot recall having found information about how he dispersed his collection of manuscript leaves and cuttings.

The Brummer Gallery Archive IV: Leaves From The Arenberg Psalter

On the same page as the most recent blog post about the Brummer photo albums is a manuscript miniature with a very distinctive shape, shown above, with a detail here:

Au Vélin d'or [II]

The other item in the 1929 catalogue that caught my eye is this:

Described as St Peter holding a key, in red green and yellow, on a leaf 26×23cm:

A Tree of Affinity

One of the miniatures in the private collection that I am cataloguing is this leaf with a fine miniature of a Tree of Affinity:

I already knew it from reproductions is a series of dealer an auction catalogues from the past few decades:

Another Forrer Bible Historiale Cutting?

On my way back from seeing the current exhibition of manuscripts in Rouen (perhaps the subject of a future post?), I visited the Musée Marmottan yesterday for the first time in about 20 years, to look at the Wildenstein leaves and cuttings, about which I've written several times before (e.g. here).

Fragments of a Dismembered Bible Historiale

In December 2015 Bloomsbury auctions offered a cutting "showing the murder of a youth" (lot 61 in the catalogue), attributed to "the early fourteenth-century husband and wife illuminator-team Richard and Jean [sic] de Montbaston":

The text was not precisely identified, and the iconography only tentatively so: "The parent text here may well be from a Bible translation, with part of Proverbs, and if correct, then the scene may represent Cain and Abel".

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.

1902 Forrer Catalogue now available online

It seems that Google scanned Robert Forrer's Unedierte Federzeichnungen Miniaturen und Initialen des Mittelalters (Strassburg, 1902) at the end of December 2014. Even though it appears not to be available in the UK through Google (except as snippet views) it is available through Archive.org.

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.

Long-Lost Miniatures from the Sigmaringen Psalter

Looking at the Lost Art website in connection with this blog post, I encountered this image:

The accompanying text states that this leaf was auctioned in Berlin in 1936, in a forced liquidation sale of 500 objects owned by the Jewish art dealer A.S. Drey: