THE EXECUTION OF DEMETRIUS NICATOR, KING OF SYRIA, a miniature cut from a copy of Laurent de Premierfait, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes malheureux, in French (a translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium), illuminated manuscript on vellum. [France (Troyes?), 15th century (c. 1470)]

THE EXECUTION OF DEMETRIUS NICATOR, KING OF SYRIA, a miniature cut from a copy of Laurent de Premierfait, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes malheureux, in French (a translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium), illuminated manuscript on vellum

[France (Troyes?), 15th century (c. 1470)]

a cutting, c. 105 × 75mm, the reverse ruled in red ink and with part of 18 lines of text written in French in a fine lettre bâtarde script, comprising part of the preceding chapter (‘concubine dudit roy Actalus … gloire en beaux fais de bata[ille]’), the miniature depicting a king wearing a blindfold and crown, kneeling next to the water’s edge, a small ship nearby, an executioner about to behead the king, wearing white clothes and hat and with his back turned towards the viewer, the scabbard partly in the water, watched by a line of men, including a prince wearing a coronet and a monk in a habit, with a castle or city beyond a grassy mound, all within by a narrow gold framing line; very slight pigment losses, e.g. at the executioner’s collar, but generally in very fine condition; in giltwood frame.

PROVENANCE

1. The parent volume apparently had a half-page miniature at the beginning of each of the nine books and a column-wide miniature at the beginning of each chapter, so it would have had about 175 miniatures in all, and can therefore only have been commissioned by a patron of exceptional wealth, either a member of the upper aristocracy or of the royal family; two of the most lavishly illuminated copies were made for Jean, Duke of Berry, and his brother John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy.
2. The volume was certainly cut up by 1862, because a miniature was in the collection of Heinrich Wilhelm Campe, Leipzig art collector, educator, and writer, who died in that year; another was owned by William Horatio Crawford, of Lakelands, who died in 1888, and four were acquired by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, also in 1888.
3. Sold in our rooms, 29 November 1990, lot 37 (ill.); bought by:
4. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1402.

ILLUMINATION

The style of illumination of the many cuttings from this volume has usually been compared to that of the Coëtivy Master (Colin d’Amiens?), one of the leading illuminators active in Paris c. 1450–80, but more recently Mara Hofmann has suggested (in the catalogue of a sale in our rooms, 8 July 2014, lot 19) that it should instead be attributed to Troyes, where a pupil of the Coëtivy Master, the Master of the Glazier Hours, worked at least temporarily, when he illuminated a lectionary for the use of the Bishop of Troyes.

This is a rare secular subject. It comes from Book V, chapter 17, in which Demetrius (d. 125 BCE), the unpopular king of Syria, escaped by ship after losing a battle at Damascus but was later caught and executed near Tyre.

Identified cuttings and leaves from the same parent manuscript include:

1. Book I.1. Samuel Anointing Saul and Boccaccio Writing His Text (sold in our rooms, 11 April 1961, lot 96)
2. Book I.6. Cadmus with the Cow on the Future Site of Thebes (Les Enluminures, Catalogue 3, 1994, no. 25a)
3. Book IV.15. The Murder of the Children of Arsinöe II Philadelphus (Les Enluminures, Catalogue 1, 1992, no. 26)
4. Book V.1. Seleucus Callinicus and Antiochus Hierax Before Boccaccio (Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.1057)
5. Book V.2. The Death of Laodamia in the Temple of Diana (sold in our rooms, 29 November 1990, lot 35)
6. Book V.14: Andriscus, the Imposter King of Macedon, Placed in the Stocks (sold in our rooms, 21 June 1993, lot 36)
7. Book V.17: The present cutting
8. Book VI.8. The Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (Les Enluminures, Catalogue 3, 1994, no. 25b)
9. Book VI.11. The Death of Ptolemy (sold in our rooms, 8 July 2014, lot 19)
10. Book VIII.20. The Execution of the Privernate General Vitruvius (Maggs Bros, Catalogue 948: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, No. 8, 1972, no. 18)
11. Book IX.2. Emperor Heraclius Expounding his Heresies (W. Voelkle & R. Wieck, The Bernard Breslauer Collection, 1992, no. 5)
12. Book IX.9. The Sultan Receiving the Emperor Diogenes (Voelkle & Wieck, as above, no. 6.)
13. Book IX.22. Boccaccio Addressing the Philosophers Theodorum, Anaxarchus, and Scaevola (Voelkle & Wieck, as above, no. 7)

The subjects of six more miniatures are unknown, the first four at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (they have paper pasted to their backs, obscuring the text and hampering identification of the scenes):

1. A king and his retinue entering the study of a scholar
2. A scholar addressing three noble ladies
3. A scholar between two groups of men
4. The Death of Caesar(?): a scholar watching as a richly-dressed man is stabbed in the back by one member of a group of men
5. One soldier killing another, outside the entrance to a church. (Christie’s, Important Old Master Drawings, 8 December 1981, part of lot 98)
6. A large miniature in a Paris private collection (cited by Voelkle & Wieck, as above, p. 74)

A few of these are mentioned in Vittore Branca, Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento (3 vols, Turin, 1999), III, no. 57 pp. 158–60. A more recent study of illustrated copies of the text (not including the present series of miniatures) is Anne D. Hedeman, Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s ‘De Casibus’ (Los Angeles, 2008).