The Office of the Dead and the Iken Psalter

The Office of the Dead is a text whose overall format is pretty consistent, but whose details vary significantly, according to different liturgical "Uses". The Office can be found in several types of liturgical and devotional manuscripts, often appearing at or near the end of a Psalter, for example, and it is a standard feature of Books of Hours. It can be particularly helpful in establishing where a book was made (or at least where it was intended to be used) when the Hours of the Virgin are missing, incomplete, or correspond to a very widespread Use such as the Use of Paris or Rome. One might find, for example, a Book of Hours illuminated by Parisian artists, with a Parisian Use for the Hours of the Virgin, but an Office of the Dead for the Use of Troyes: a sure clue to the area where the patron lived.

The Source of the Composition of a Fake Drawing

I am helping to catalogue the collection of leaves and fragments owned by the late Marvin Colker, which will be sold at Christie's in about a month's time. The collection contains lots of interest, and I have at least one more blogpost in preparation about items from it. Today I provide a very brief one, concerning the drawing above.

Two More Leaves of the MdM and AdM Hours

In May I wrote a blogpost about two leaves from a Book of Hours which has the initials "MdM" and "AdM" -- presumably of its husband and wife owners -- in the borders; they are at Montreal and Rochester, NY. By chance I found another leaf from the same manuscript while in the US in July, in Toledo, Ohio, and wrote another blogpost about them after my return. In the second of these posts I reproduced a page from a 1923 Maggs Bros catalogue, in which four leaves of the manuscript are described, including the Toledo one. 

I have now found two more leaves, at least one of which is described in the Maggs catalogue. The two new leaves do not have the telltale initials "MdM" and "AdM" in their borders, but I am confident -- based on the style of script and decoration, and the number of lines per page -- that they come from the same manuscript.

A New Leaf of the Quadripartite Miniatures Series (Paris, c.1340)

Perhaps the most exciting discovery of my summer trip to various collections in NY, OH, and Toronto was a wealth of unknown or little-known material at the Royal Ontario Museum. Among many interesting illuminated cuttings and text leaves is the quadripartite miniature shown above, a previously unrecognised member of a group of miniatures now scattered between private and institutional collections including the Lilly, Bodleian, and British Libraries, Fitzwilliam Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Otto Ege's Limoges Missal (HL38)

The early 20th-century provenance of Otto Ege's Limoges Missal, leaves of which were no. 38 in his posthumous portfolio of Fifty Original Leaves, is already well established. Scott Gwara (Otto Ege's Manuscripts, 2013, HL38) records sales at Sotheby's, 26 March 1917, lot 799; American Art/Anderson Galleries, 20 January 1925, lot 288; and American Art/Anderson Galleries, 8 February 1926, lot 288.

Another Leaf of the Arrivabene Eusebius

Thanks to the kindness of Steven Galbraith of the Rochester Institute of Technology, I have just received images of some of the leaves I was unable to see in person while in Rochester this summer. They have all sorts of interesting items, but one in particular caught my attention, a detail of which is shown above.

A few years ago wrote a blogpost about "An Unnoticed Arrivabene Leaf at the Newberry Library" (here); it concerns one of two leaves formerly owned by Ernst F. Detterer (1888-1947) of Chicago, friend of Otto Ege, and now at the Newberry. I was unable to locate the second leaf, but I think it must be the one now at Rochester.

The Source of the Idea for the Lomax-Wade Collection?

 A very short post today, as I need to finish preparing my talk for next week's CULTIVATE MSS conference.

Regular readers may remember a series of posts about the "Lomax-Wade" collection of cuttings (here and following weeks): a collection of 120 illuminations (one of which is shown above) mounted on card and bound into a copy of Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (London, 1833):

"Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, extra-illustrated with one hundred and twenty cuttings from manuscripts [...]"

Although the book was published in 1833, this copy was in a binding signed by the noted London binder Charles Lewis, dated 1838.

I have recently discovered that in his catalogue for 1834, just a few years before the Lomax-Wade volume was bound, the London bookseller William Pickering offered some Italian illuminated cuttings for sale (doubtless from the Celotti collection, largely dispersed during the previous decade), recommending that they might be bound into a copy of Shaw's book!

"These original specimens would make an admirable addition to a copy of Mr. Shaw's Illuminated Ornaments."