L12240

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Lot 3
  • 3

St. Augustine of Hippo, in a large historiated initial on a leaf from an illuminated antiphoner, on vellum [Bologna, c.1310]

Estimate
4,000 - 6,000 GBP
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Description

  • Vellum
a large leaf, 600mm. by 415mm., with a large initial 'I' (opening "In venit se augustinus longe ...", the first response of the first nocturn of Matins for the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, 28 August), 190mm. by 75mm., the saint with a brightly burnished halo, holding a book and a staff within a soft brown portico with a blue interior heightened with curling white penwork, within thick gold frame, coloured acanthus-leaf foliage extending on three sides of borders, enclosing two roundels (with a pope seated writing and St. Augustine before a Dominican friar preaching to a crowd) joined by a geometric design in the bas-de-page, 5 lines of text in brown ink in a late gothic hand with music on a 4-line red stave, the same and a red initial on verso, 4 lines of tiny instructions to illuminator in brown ink on head of recto, nineteenth-century folio number "82" and pencil "No.18" on recto, nineteenth-century Italian and French export stamps on verso, some slight cockling, crease to base (with minor crackling to roundels) slight flaking from legs of the saint and slight smudge to face, scuffing to gold, else good condition

Catalogue Note

This leaf is from an antiphoner,once part of a set of choirbooks in grand format made for the church of San Domenico in Bologna, the burial place of St. Dominic himself. It is identifiable as the work of the Seneca Master (previously called the Primo Miniatore di San Domenico), a near-contemporary of Giotto. The Seneca Master's work dominated the output of Bologna in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Ten volumes of the antiphonal-series and eleven volumes of the gradual-series still survive in the library of San Dominico (Alce and D'Amato, La Biblioteca di S. Domenico in Bologna, 1961, pp.141-69, MSS 3, 4, 5, 6, 12 and 14). Together these manuscripts constitute the most important cycle of choirbooks made in Bologna in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and they became the prototype for Dominican manuscripts after them.

What is of especial note here is that the detailed instructions for the illuminator remain in faint brown ink on the upper part of the recto, partly underneath the foliate border, asking for a miniature of "beatum augustinum cum libro" above "duas rotas ...".

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