Last week we looked at a manuscript sold by Dawson's Book Shop of Los Angeles, and broken up by Otto Ege (or perhaps Philip Duschnes). Today we'll look at a few more.
For the catalogue of French manuscripts in the collection of Bob McCarthy I traced eleven leaves with historiated initials from a Parisian Bible of about the 1330s (of which a detail is shown above), and about sixteen more without historiated initials:
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| [Photo by Mildred Budney] |
One of the better-known and easily recognised ex-Ege manuscripts was a copy of Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, Book I, of which a leaf is shown above. Leaves from the manuscript are included as no. 40 in Ege's most famous portfolio: Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts, issued by his widow two years after his death in 1951.
Although Philip Duschnes of New York was apparently the first dealer to offer single leaves of the manuscript, it is likely that Ege was responsible for breaking it up: not only did he have enough leaves to include in his 1942(?) portfolio of Original Leaves from Famous Books, Nine Centuries as well as the posthumous Fifty Original Leaves portfolios, but a cache of 32 leaves from his collection was sold by his heirs at Sotheby's in 1985. The finest leaf of the manuscript was retained by the Ege heirs as part of the "Family Album", acquired by the Beinecke Library several years ago; if Duschnes had broken up the volume, he would doubtless have sold this leaf.
I wrote a blogpost about the provenance of the manuscript last year. We know that the volume was still intact in 1925-26 when offered for sale by the bookselling firm of Davis & Orioli, based in Florence and London. It was also still intact when owned by an "Unidentified American bookseller", but was broken by 1941, when Duschnes offered leaves in his Catalogue 48.
Yesterday I discovered an apparently unrecorded catalogue for an auction held at Dulwich, south London, by "Mr Shuttleworth". The front page of the 4-leaf catalogue is shown above; it mentions:
"several very beautiful 'MISSAL DRAWINGS' [...] from the Papal Sacristy [...] by the celebrated Miniaturist, Buonfratelli [...]"
Following the descriptions of lots 38-43 is the note that they:
"were spoils from the Papal Sacristy of the Vatican, at the last entry of the French into Rome, and were brought to England by the Abbate Celotti"
He also owned at least two albums of material relating to medieval manuscripts compiled by John Bradley, the author of important 19th-century works including A Dictionary of Miniaturists, Illuminators, Calligraphers and Copyists, with Reference to Their Works and Notices of Their Patrons ... (3 vols., 1887-89).
During my recent trip to the US I visited the Memorial Art Gallery of the Univeristy of Rochester (NY), and was able to examine the leaf of the Book of Hours which has the initials MdM and AdM in the borders, about which I wrote in this post.
I have just found a clutch of a dozen more foliate minor initials from the Murano Gradual (about which I wrote in March, here) at the Musée Saint-Remi, Reims. It is notable that some of them are cropped right to the edges of the illumination, as in the example above; all twelve are shown below.
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| NYC, Morgan Library, MS M.870.2 [Source] |
I have now found an even earlier description of the complete volume, which supplies a few extra details.
