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.

Byzantine Evangelist Portraits

[Source]

I do not usually stray into the realm of Byzantine manuscripts but I make an exception today. Three full-page miniatures of the Evangelists were offered by Les Enluminures, Catalogue 7 (1998), nos. 14a, b, c; the one depicting St Luke is now at The Met Museum (shown above, and online here).

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 Pontifical of Michel Guibé [II]

[Image credit: see below]

Having identified the patron of the Pontifical of Michel Guibé, it quickly became apparent that he is rather well known as a patron of liturgical manuscripts. There is a 2001 monograph devoted to another of his manuscripts, a Pontifical-Missal including the ordo for the coronation of the Dukes of Brittany, now in the Archives de l'évêché de Rennes:

The Pontifical of Michel Guibé [I]

In 2007, after a day in spent looking at illuminated leaves and cuttings at the Princeton Museum of Art, I walked past a general antiques shop and noticed a framed leaf of a late 15th-century French illuminated manuscript in the window.

I have not been back to the shop since then, but it looks as if one of these leaves, in its simple gold frame, was still hanging inside the window of the shop as recently as August 2017, when Google StreetView captured these images :

[source]

Detail of the upper right corner of the left shop window [source]

Leaves from a 14th-century Dominican Lectionary

In the last few years I have seen a number of leaves from a volume written in a strange "prescissa" or "sine pedibus" script: in which the bottoms of the minims terminate without an upturn or a lozenge as a foot. The script is perhaps most often associated with England in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Luttrell Psalter being a classic example:

The present manuscript certainly does not look English, however, and attributions have included  "Germany, 15th century", "Flanders, late 14th century", "late XIVth c. ... probably written in Flanders", "Northern Spain, ca. 1350", and "northern Spain, first half of the fourteenth century": people obviously have trouble deciding where and when it was written. I always thought it curious, but had no reason to pursue it. Earlier this year however, I was generously given a leaf of the manuscript, and thus a reason to think about it in a more focused way.

Miniatures by William de Brailes

[click to enlarge]

One of the major works by William de Brailes is a series of full-page miniatures, now divided between the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (which has 24 leaves; online here) and the Wildenstein collection at the Musée Marmottan, Paris (which has seven, six of which are shown above). [1]