- 3
St. Augustine of Hippo, in a large historiated initial on a leaf from an illuminated antiphoner, on vellum [Bologna, c.1310]
Description
- Vellum
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 ...".