![]() ![]() For years now, Peter has generously shared his interest in Italian cuttings, and many of us in the field of Italian manuscript studies cite him frequently (and not just as a footnote). The Murano and San Giorgio Maggiore fragments share in many cases similar provenance pathways, a fact that further confounds the attempts by scholars to distinguish the Murano Master from Belbello da Pavia (the latter of whom illuminated volumes for the Benedictines at S Giorgio). Grateful for the acknowledgement that I suggested the Houghton-Fitzwilliam connection, once Peter kindly shared the border fragment, and adding that I suggested that the additional fragments may be from the San Giorgio Maggiore volumes nearby in the laguna. by Paul Binski and Stella Panayotova (London: Harvey Miller, 2005), no. For a recent, detailed, analysis of the Fitzwilliam Museum cutting, see Stella Panayotova in The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, ed. Neither they nor I followed up these leads, however, until this week - little realising how close Bryan had come to making the connections that I can demonstrate today. Going back to the email exchange, after writing this blogpost, I find that Bryan did in fact respond by suggesting that the Houghton border I had sent was comparable specifically to the Murano Master's Berlin gradual (generally believed to be a companion (Temporale) volume of the dismembered (Sanctorale) volume - both with illuminations by the Murano Master), and also to the Fitzwilliam cutting. They both enthusiastically agreed with my suggestion, and subsequently included it in a list of Murano Master cuttings and leaves at the end of their article ‘Uno splendido enigma: Il Maestro del Graduale di Murano’, Alumina, 64, 2019, 14–21. My interest in Italian illuminated cuttings has really only developed in the past year, so on finding the image of the Houghton cutting in March 2018 I sent it, in an email with the subject-line "Murano Gradual border?", to Bryan Keene and Stephanie Azzarello, whom I knew to be working on the artist. Īs far as I can tell from the available image, the Houghton border is made up of three separate pieces, joined together with a couple of visible breaks along the lower part: ![]() according to the online description - so it is presumably from a huge choirbook. Ignoring the three smallest pieces in the upper left and middle of the page, my eye was especially caught by the large border that occupies the right-hand side and lower part of this page. It was later transferred to the Houghton Library. 1050, records that it was part of a group given the Fogg Art Museum by William Augustus White (d. The reverse of the sheet has 1916 accession numbers, and de Ricci, Census, p. 18 (detail) Ī couple of years ago, trawling the Fragmentarium website for illuminated manuscripts, I encountered this group of cuttings of medieval borders, attached to a page from a 19th- or early-20th-century album: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |