A Gradual at Central St Martin's, From the Collection of Howel Wills

A year or two ago, I discovered that Central St Martins, the London college of art and design [Wikipedia], has a collection of medieval illuminated manuscript leaves and cuttings, including quite a number of interest to me. I'll try to write about some of them on another occasion, but today I will describe one of their three bound codices: a characteristically large late medieval Italian choirbook.

Illuminated Manuscripts from the Collection of Siegfried Laemmle (1863-1953)

Siegfried Laemmle

This week's blog has lots of gaps in it -- I am hoping that readers can help fill some of them.

Having worked in the Department of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum for two years in the early 1990s, I naturally have an interest in medieval manuscripts in LA (and California more generally). But it was only fairly recently that I was able to obtain a copy of a fairly scarce catalogue of an exhibition held in 1953-54:

Loans came from "the usual suspects", including the Walters, the Morgan, and the Houghton; and from some well-known dealers and collectors, such as Duveen Brothers, H.P. Kraus, Wildenstein and Company, and Philip Hofer; but also from a small number of much less well-known dealers and collectors, such as Victor Spark, Piero Tozzi, Siegfried Laemmle -- a successful Munich art dealer who fled to the US from Germany in 1938 -- and his son Walter.

Three Brölemann Updates

I. Brölemann "Catalogue A"
The Brölemann "Catalogue A" discussed in a recent post sold for €5,790, approximately seventy-five times higher than its pre-sale estimate of €70-90!

I do not yet know who the successful buyer was, but I am attempting to find out.

Unrecognised Brölemann Provenances

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been attempting to create a list of the Brölemann manuscripts, with a detailed account of their pre- and post-Brölemann provenances. It is now nearly 100 pages long, and I hope to share it fairly soon.

This exercise has been interesting for lots of reasons, one of which is to see how many later owners were, and still are, unaware of Bröleman's prior ownership. In some cases this is doubtless because the volume has been rebound, and the old covers with the Brölemann bookplate discarded, but in many others the volume has apparently not been rebound, which suggests that the bookplate was never there. I suspect that Henry-Auguste Bröleman (d. 1854), who formed the collection, put his characteristic blue-edged octagonal labels in all his most valuable books, but that towards the end of the century his grandson, Arthur-Auguste (d. 1904), put his bookplate in them only selectively.

Here are some manuscripts whose most recent or current owners seem (according to the most recent descriptions that I can find) not to know of their prior Brölemann provenances:

The Manuscripts of T. O. Weigel, V: Volto Santo Images; or, The Importance of Consulting Hardcopy Catalogues

[Source]

There are two versions of the Weigel catalogue online. In my first blogpost about the collection, I included a link to one which includes the colour images, of which an opening is shown above.

But there is another version, with blank spaces in place of the images, presumably because of perceived copyright issues. This image shows the same pair of pages as the one above, but the reproduction of the Crucifixion miniature has been suppressed:

[Source]

The Illuminated Cuttings and Leaves of Eugène Rodrigues (1853-1928)

I recently catalogued for a Sotheby's sale, on 3 December 2019, lot 1, the cutting above. It belongs to a group in which I have had an interest for many years.

The Manuscripts of T. O. Weigel, IV: Cuttings from a Dominican Nuns' Antiphonary (from Zurich, and datable to 1300?)

The apparently unique iconography of the miniature above allows us to identify it as no. 26 in the 1898 Weigel and 1905 Hiersemann catalogues discussed in the previous posts: