THE MEETING AT THE GOLDEN GATE and JOB ON THE DUNG HEAP, two full-page miniatures attributed to Jean Colombe, on two leaves from a Book of Hours, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum. [France (Bourges?), 15th century (c. 1470)]

THE MEETING AT THE GOLDEN GATE and JOB ON THE DUNG HEAP, two full-page miniatures attributed to Jean Colombe, on two leaves from a Book of Hours, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

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

two miniatures, each c.155 × 105mm, each filling the verso of a leaf, the rectos (framed as the reverses) with the ends of preceding texts in a fine bâtarde script with two-line illuminated initials: (a) The Meeting at the Golden Gate, with Joachim and Anne, the Virgin Mary’s parents, about to embrace, standing outside the open doorway of an elaborate city wall with a gold door; the recto with the end of the Verses of St Gregory: ‘iustos. peccatores iustifica omnibus fidelibus miserere et propicius efto mihi peccatori. Amen. Pater noster. Ave Maria. Domine Ihesu Christe propter illam amaritudinem tuam …’; (b) Job on the Dung Heap, set in a courtyard in Bourges, Job’s body free of the sores that are sometimes depicted, approached by his three friends (Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite), who gesticulate as they speak to him; the recto with the end of the prayer ‘Fidelium deus omnium conditor et redemptor …’; the backs of the leaves inscribed with late 19th-century prices in a Continental hand ‘5800’ and ‘3600’, and with Bruce Ferrini’s pencilled stock nos. ‘VM 6609’ and ‘VM 6611’; minor abrasion and some very small areas of pigment loss, e.g. part of Anne’s white veil, and a crease at the upper left corner of the Job leaf, but generally in fine condition; each in a giltwood frame, with a photocopy of the reverse of each leaf stuck to the back.

PROVENANCE

1. From a Book of Hours apparently broken-up by the late 19th century, when the leaves were in an unidentified French(?) collection.
2. Bruce Ferrini (1950–2010), manuscripts dealer of Akron, Ohio: his non-consecutive stock numbers on the reverse suggest that he had at least one more miniature from the same manuscript.
3. Sam Fogg Rare Books and Manuscripts: bought in April 1990 by:
4. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1404.

ILLUMINATION

The miniatures can be attributed to Jean Colombe (c.1430–1498), who was born and worked in Bourges for most of his life, except for an interlude in the late 1480s in Savoy, where he completed the illumination of the Duke de Berry’s Très Riches Heures and the Apocalypse of the Dukes of Savoy (Escorial, MS E. Vit. V). Some of his works are described or listed by Plummer (1982), and his oeuvre was reexamined in the landmark exhibition in Paris in 1993 (Avril & Reynaud, 1993).

A striking feature of Colombe’s mature work, exemplified in the present miniatures, is the central role played by architecture. The walls and gateway of Jerusalem in The Meeting at the Golden Gate, depicted like those of a contemporary, late-medieval, French city, are treated as far more important and detailed than the somewhat muted and impressionistic landscape setting. In Job on the Dung Heap the building on the left behind Job creates dramatic perspective, and leads the eye back towards the building in the right background, which is recognisably the Sainte-Chapelle at Bourges (built by Jean, Duke de Berry and destroyed in the 18th century). John Plummer appositely described Colombe’s ‘figures placed in elaborate, rather operatic stage sets … the miniatures have a breadth and complexity that belies their actual size’ (1982, p. 54). In the Meeting at the Golden gate miniature, we see Colombe’s talent for evoking atmosphere: the use of subtle gold highlights on draperies and architecture under a dark blue sky gives a sense that the scene takes place at dusk, bathed in a sunset glow.

REFERENCES

J. Plummer, The Last Flowering: French Painting in Manuscripts, 1420–1530, from American Collections (New York, London: Pierpont Morgan Library, OUP, 1982), esp. nos. 42, 54, 68–70.

F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Quand la peinture était dans les livres: les manuscrits enluminés en France, 1400–1520 (Paris, 1993), pp. 326–38.