Medieval Manuscripts at Keio University

[The Patou Bible at the Free Library, Philadelphia, about which I blogged a week ago, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had anticipated, so the next posts will have to wait a bit longer. In the meantime, readers may be interested to learn of a new publication.]

Thanks to Richard Linenthal I recently became aware of an exhibition of manuscripts belonging to Keio University, and thanks to the kindness of Takami Matsuda, I have a copy of the catalogue. A detail of the front cover, showing the English title, is above.

A Bible in Philadelphia, Attributed to the Grusch Atelier [I]

I have always struggled to understand the fundamental book about 13th-century Parisian illumination: Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (University of California Press, 1977).

I have had to grapple with it again in earnest during the past couple of years, while cataloguing leaves in the McCarthy Collection, several of which have been attributed (wrongly, in my opinion) to artists and ateliers defined and named by Branner, including "The Dominican Painter", "The Leber Group", "The Atelier of the Vienna Moralized Bibles", and "The Johannes Grusch Atelier".

The latter atelier has been the subject of an extended exchange on Twitter this week, and in the course of trying to understand Branner's definition of the style(s), I went looking for digitized versions of the manuscripts he cites. One of them is a Bible at the Free Library, Philadelphia (MS Lewis E 242), recently digitized as part of the Bibliophilly project.

The McCarthy Collection, Vol. II, Now Available

I have numerous blogposts in my drafts folder, but none that are ready to publish without some more work, so this weekend I will instead take the opportunity to advertise that a catalogue of illuminated manuscript leaves and cuttings, containing much new provenance information, was published a few weeks ago.

Basic details: 305×250mm; 248 pp.; 63 catalogue entries describing nearly 100 items; all reproduced in colour, often including the reverse side, and often with sister-leaves and/or comparanda in other collections.
ISBN 9781912168132.

It can be ordered from the publisher here, but does not seem to be available yet through Amazon or other sources.

The Name of the Rose (1986) - An Addendum

Since writing the previous post, I had another look on YouTube, and found a clip of the film in which Baskerville and Adso first visit the Library. All the manuscripts appear in the first 2 minutes of this 4½-minute clip:


This scene includes a few more shots of open manuscripts, mostly the same as the ones seen in the scriptorium scene.

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts in The Name of the Rose (1986)

Sean Connery, as William de Baskerville, inspecting a manuscript

I ended the previous post with a modern copy of a medieval manuscript, that had been made as a prop for the film The Name of the Rose [Wikipedia], based on Umberto Eco's book about a medieval manuscript, library, and murder mystery. I later decided to have a look at the film to see if I could see the facsimile manuscript's appearance. I don't have a copy of the full movie, but there is a scene (full of inaccuracies and anachronisms) available on Youtube (embedded below) set in the monastery's scriptorium, and just for fun I decided to take a series of screenshots, to see how many of the manuscripts included in the scene are identifiable.

[The 4½-minute scene should play if if click this YouTube link, with the usual options to pause, watch full-screen, etc.; but you don't have to watch it in order to understand what follows]

[That link died; here's another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDUXdUO7PHI]

Here is an overview of the scriptorium, as seen when the heroes of the story (the Franciscan William de Baskerville, played by Sean Connery, and his young protégé Adso of Melk, played by Christian Slater) first enter the room:

A Fake in Detroit

[Source]

My recent post about 19th- or early 20th-century miniatures and initials added to medieval manuscripts seemed to be popular, so I will do a series of blogs about other illuminations that I believe to be either entirely modern, or "improved" in the post-medieval period.

Kay Sutton (1943–2019)

Kay outside the Musée Cluny, Paris, in 2007

Many readers of this blog will have known, or at least known of, Kay Sutton, who died yesterday. Having been diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and undergone successful chemotherapy, the disease returned untreatably a few months ago.