St Catherine of Alexandria, historiated initial on a leaf from the Breviary of St Julian's Abbey, in Latin [France (Tours), c.1460-70]

single leaf, 182x125mm, vellum, with a historiated initial ‘G’ and a three-sided border for the feast of St Catherine in the Sanctorale, 2 columns, 30 lines, 120x77mm, slightly cockled, overall in good condition

The delicate style and use of camaïeu d’or for the elegant figure of St Catherine is closely associated with JEAN FOUQUET and his workshop. Fouquet painted his self-portrait in gold hatched strokes on a dark blue enamel (Paris, Musée du Louvre), and the monochrome technique is found in a number of manuscripts attributed to him, including the Hours of Étienne Chevalier (see Jean Fouquet, 2003, nos.9 and 24). The present leaf belongs to a Breviary that was made for the use of the abbey of St Julian in Tours, and must have been broken-up by 1840: one portion containing the Psalter bears the ex-libris of Carl Göran Bonde (1757-1840), now Stockholm, Riksarkivet, MS 1 (see G. Böcker, Nyförvärv och nyupptäckter, 1987, no.60), while another portion including the Calendar and the Temporale, which opens with a historiated initial in camaïeu d’or, was donated to the University Library of Lund in 1842 by Christian Gissel Berlin (1800-1863), professor of mathematics (Medeltidshandskrift 38; description and images online). A leaf with an initial depicting Christ Resurrected is MS 130 is in the Matsuda collection at Keio University. The present leaf was part of the Sanctorale. Jean Fouquet often used the camaïeu d’or technique for works on a small scale, such as historiated initials. Two Books of Hours with tiny miniatures in camaïeu d’or are also closely linked to Fouquet’s style and may be the work of the young Jean Bourdichon who trained with Fouquet in the 1470s (Geneva, Comites Latentes MS 38; and priv. coll.: see A Medieval Best-Seller?, 2013, no.7).