THREE HISTORIATED INITIALS ON A LEAF FROM THE PSALTER OF JOAN OF NAVARRE, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [France (Paris), 13th century (c. 1220–25)]

THREE HISTORIATED INITIALS ON A LEAF FROM THE PSALTER OF JOAN OF NAVARRE, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

[France (Paris), 13th century (c. 1220–25)]

a leaf, c. 260 × 170mm, ruled in leadpoint for 19 lines (c. 140 × 80 mm), written above top line in black ink in a handsome early gothic book hand, the text comprising Psalm 118:71–89, decorated with verse initials alternately gold with blue penwork or blue with red penwork, line-fillers alternately red and blue, or gold with red or blue, three in the form of gold dragons sprouting red and blue penwork into the margins, THREE LARGE HISTORIATED INITIALS in gold and colours, each with marginal extensions and marginal captions in red or blue; with a few light creases and undulations in the vellum, small losses of pigment, two very small worm-holes, some surface wear, but generally in fine condition; in a double-sided frame.

PROVENANCE

1. The parent volume was produced in Paris at about the time of the very short reign of Louis VIII, 1223–26 (between the reigns of Philip Augustus, 1180–1223, and Louis IX, 1226–1270). As the great scholar and connoisseur Léopold Delisle remarked in 1897, it is one of the masterpieces of French 13th-century art, and must have been made for a member of the royal family, a major aristocrat, or leading courtier. The manuscript presumably stayed within the orbit of the French royal family, passing from one generation to the next for two centuries until owned by:
2. JOAN OF NAVARRE (1370–1437), QUEEN OF ENGLAND 1403–1413, daughter of Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, and of Joanna, daughter of Jean II, King of France, who in 1386 married John, Duke of Brittany (d. 1399), after whose death she married, in 1403, Henry IV, King of England 1399–1413, with whom she is buried in Canterbury Cathedral; the manuscript is signed by her ‘Royne Jahanne’ (reproduced by James (1921, p. 67) and Delisle (1897, p. 388): the latter concludes, by comparison with four other autographs of Jeanne, that ‘La signature ROYNE JAHANNE est incontestablement celle de Jeanne de Navarre’.
3. The parent volume stayed in England after Joan’s death, where it received its current binding at the end of the 15th century; the name of Thomas Becket and references to popes were erased from the calendar at the Reformation. In the 19th century it was owned by Henry Mainwaring (1782–1860), 1st Baronet Mainwaring, from whom it was acquired by James Lindsay (1847–1913), 26th Earl of Crawford, whose manuscripts were bought by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1834–1908), and are now at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester, where it is MS Lat. 22. The present leaf must therefore have been separated from the parent volume by 1908, and probably by 1860, and was unknown until it came to light as the property of:
4. Rev. Harry Baylis, Prebendary of Lichfield Cathedral: sold in our rooms, 6 July 1964, lot 217; bought for £240 by Maggs Bros., perhaps on behalf of the friend of Clifford Maggs:
5. Miss Jean C. Grattan (1908? – c. 1985): sold as her property in our rooms, 24 June 1986, lot 47; bought presumably by:
6. John L. Feldman (1957–2021), book collector and philanthropist: lent anonymously by him to the exhibition Medieval Manuscripts: Paintings on Parchment, Denver Art Museum, April–June 1989, no. 9, where recognised for the first time as coming from the Psalter of Joan of Navarre; sold a year later in our rooms, 19 June 1990, lot 46 (with full-page colour plate), bought by:
7. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1204.

TEXT AND ILLUMINATION

The Psalter of Joan of Navarre is one of a small number of Psalters that has a historiated initial for every psalm; apart from a few very exceptional outliers, such as the 9th-century Utrecht Psalter and its copies, most were produced in Paris in the 13th century (Peterson, 1987).

The text of the present leaf is Psalm 118:71–89: ‘Bonum mihi quia humiliasti me … verbum tuum permanet in celo’. Unique among the 150 psalms, Psalm 118 is divided into sections of 8 verses, each identified by a letter of the Hebrew alphabet: verse 1 is Aleph, verse 9 is Beth, verse 17 is Gimel, and so on. The present leaf has the initials for the 10th–12th divisions:

1.   Psalm 119:73 (Yod). Initial ‘M’(anus tue): The Creation of Adam, with caption ‘Deus plasmat ho(m)i(n)e(m)’; God takes the naked Adam by the hand

2.   Psalm 119:81 (Kaf). Initial ‘D’(efecit in salutare tuum): The Presentation in the Temple, with caption ‘obl(ati)o s(an)c(t)e Marie’; the Virgin Mary passes the infant Jesus to Simeon over an altar, while Joseph watches

3.   Psalm 119:89 (Lamed). Initial ‘I’(n eternum): God Creating the Heavenly Spheres, with contemporary title ‘(Christus) fac(et) sole(m)’; God creates a series of orbs, one of which is fiery red

According to the collation and list of initials provided by James, 1921, the present leaf is one of only two leaves of the psalms missing from the parent volume, and the only one with historiated initials.

The style of the initials belong to the distinctive ‘Muldenfaltenstil’, or troughed-fold style – especially evident in God’s rose mantle in the Creation of Adam scene – probably derived from metalwork, sculpture, and enamels, and found in manuscripts in the decades around 1200; the Ingeborg Psalter (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 9) of c.1200 being perhaps its finest expression in a manuscript. The present Psalter can probably be dated after 1218 (because the calendar includes the 4 December feast of the Relics of Paris Cathedral) and thus comes from the final years of the style’s use. Branner (1977) includes the parent manuscript in his list of manuscripts associated with the atelier of the Vienna Moralized Bibles.

REFERENCES

L. Delisle, ‘Notice sur un psautier de XIII^e siècle appartenant au comte de Crawford’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes, 58 (1897), pp. 381–93.

M.R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, 2 vols (Manchester, 1921), I, pp. 64–71; II, pls. 48–50.

E.A. Peterson, ‘Accidents and Adaptations in Transmission among Fully-Illustrated French Psalters in the Thirteenth Century’, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 50 no. 3 (1987), pp. 375–84, citing the present leaf on p. 376.

R. Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 45–48, cat. 206, figs. 58, 62.