ID 794459
Lot 7 | Lombard illuminator
Estimate value
£ 7 000 – 10 000
Crucifixion, canon miniature cut from a Missal, illuminated manuscript on vellum [northern Italy, possibly Milan, c.1430s]
An imposing Crucifixion painted in northern Italy in the early 15th century, whose great refinement and expressive qualities still endure, a testament to the enduring Gothic legacy in Lombard illumination.
324 x 234mm. The miniature laid down onto a fragmentary choirbook leaf used as a support, the leaf with four-line red staves above text preserving the partial text ‘alma flore’ (the border decoration at the bottom right extended onto the support in another hand, three repaired losses to the right-hand margin, one with a split extending into the miniature to touch the foot of St John, further marginal tears or small losses similarly repaired, some surface darkening, rubbing and fading).
Similarities may be observed between this Canon miniature and another appearing in a Missal for the use of Milan owned by Lord Leicester (Holkham Hall, MS 34, f.136v; see S. Reynolds, A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library at Holkham Hall; Volume I. Manuscripts from Italy to 1500, 2015, pp. 48-51): the figure types and the blue patterned backgrounds are immediately comparable. Made for the Dominican convent of St Eustorgio, the Missal at Holkham was painted in the 1430s by the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum, the dominant illuminator in Milan under Filippo Maria Visconti, who, with his assistants, produced many books for eminent patrons associated with the Visconti court. The palette of our miniature is rather more subdued than the Holkham Crucifixion, even accounting for some darkening of the painted surface; the simple marginal extensions of spikey acanthus more restrained; and the swirling Gothic folds of the draperies and highly expressive faces, on which emotions are rather harshly etched, show a more pronounced debt to the artist and illuminator Giovannino de’ Grassi, whose influence on Lombard illumination endured into the first decades of the 15th century: the Missal from which this miniature was excised may have been painted a little earlier than the example at Holkham, perhaps, or elsewhere in the north of Italy.
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