All Saints in a historiated initial on a leaf from a vast illuminated Gradual, on vellum [Spain, late fifteenth or early sixteenth century]

single leaf, 723mm. by 520mm., with a large initial ‘G’ (opening “Gaudeamus omnes in domino …”, the introit for the Feast of All Saints), 234mm. by 210mm, in white and green stylised acanthus leaves terminating in a dragon’s head, enclosing many saints, including SS. Peter, Paul, Andrew and a female saint (perhaps Anne), in the lower compartment, and a series of orange-red angels in flight in the upper compartment, on thick burnished gold grounds with the four attributes of the evangelists in the corners and a detailed grey bird standing on a tendril of the initial, extensions of a coloured textbar down entire length of leaf ending in geometric terminals filled in with gold, the initial and textbar supporting a dragon biting the tail of a mermaid, a long necked bat-winged drollery being struck by another with a cudgel, a nude man trying to catch a grey bird, two storks, a hunting dog and two simple birds (the dove perhaps a later addition), folio number “CXIIIJ” in red in upper margin, 5 lines of text with music on a 4-line red stave, similar text on verso with an elaborate penwork initial, single line of red text “BEATAE ANNAE CU[M]” and two lines of text and music on verso block-printed onto leaf in seventeenth or eighteenth century, scuffs and cracks to paintwork in places, with one drollery creature badly smudged and the terminal of the textbar with a dog in bas-de-page erased, much of leaf cockled, else fair, framed

The apparently anachronous combination of elements of both fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flemish art with more Italianate features is distinctive to late medieval Spanish book-art. The cudgel-wielding drollery creatures and geometric terminals are drawn from fourteenth-century Flanders, and appear elsewhere in the Pontifical of Archbishop Carrillo (now Madrid, National Library, Vit. 18-9: see Dominguez Bordona, Spanish Illumination, II, 1930, no.114). However, the naked man trying to catch the bird at the base of the page echoes later Italianate Renaissance models, and suggests the date of this leaf.