THE VISION OF EZEKIEL, PAINTED BY THE ALMAGEST MASTER: a historiated initial on an imperfect leaf from a Bible, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum. [France (Paris), 13th century (c. 1220s)]

THE VISION OF EZEKIEL, PAINTED BY THE ALMAGEST MASTER: a historiated initial on an imperfect leaf from a Bible, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

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

a single leaf, c. 185 × 135 mm, the outer and lower margins excised, pricked in the inner margin, written in two columns of 57 lines in gothic script, below top line, the recto (the reverse, as framed) with part of baruch 5–6, with a large illuminated initial marking the start of chapter 6 (‘Proper peccata que peccastis ante deum …’), known as The Letter of Jeremiah, the verso (framed as the front) with the end of Baruch, the usual prologue to Ezekiel, and the beginning of Ezekiel, the initial ‘E’ (‘Et factum est in xxx anno iiii in v mensis …’; It came to pass in the 30th year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day), depicting the Vision of Ezekiel: he sits to the left, next to the river Chobar, looking up at three heads in the sky, of a man, an eagle, a lion, and a calf (Ezekiel 1:3, 10); the lower and outer margins cropped, without loss of text or decoration, the initials in very fine, bright, condition; framed with a cutout window on the reverse allowing the illuminated initial and adjacent text to be seen.

PROVENANCE

1. The parent manuscript had probably lost at least 60 leaves by the 19th century (Kidd, 2021, p. 63), and was certainly further broken up by 1981, when a leaf was for sale in Heidelberg. Some leaves, including the present one, had one or more margins cropped, perhaps to remove water-stains. A carcass of 181 leaves (‘several mutilated … some margins cropped … heavy staining … almost all the decorative elements have been removed’) and the binding appeared on the market in 2014.
2. Bernard Quaritch, c. 1988
3. Sold in our rooms, 5 December 2012, part of lot 4, bought by:
4. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1318

ILLUMINATION

The artist of this leaf was first defined by François Avril, who named him the Master of the Sorbonne Ptolemy, after a manuscript of Ptolemy’s Almagest which was in the library of the Sorbonne in the 14th century, and which has a colophon recording that it was copied from the exemplar of Saint-Victor, Paris, and finished in December 1213 (Paris, BnF, MS 16200; Avril, 1976, pp. 38–40 and p. 41 fig. 5). Avril attributed the illumination of copies of a number of other University texts to the same artist, as well as that of several Bibles and glossed Bibles, which provide supporting evidence that he worked in Paris in the 1210s and 1220s. Robert Branner’s posthumous study of 13th-century French illumination was published the following year, describing several manuscripts by the artist, whom he independently named the artist The Almagest Master, after the same manuscript, a name which has gained greater currency (Branner, 1977). Branner’s description of the Sorbonne manuscript could equally be applied to the present leaf: ‘startlingly high in quality … painted in the finest manner’.

Branner, who did not know the present manuscript, dated the Bibles illuminated by the artist to 1220–25, and this is fully supported by the present leaf: a date after about 1220 is suggested by the fact that the writing is below top line, while a date before about 1230 is suggested by the prickings in the inner margin, the green edging around the initials, and the pre-modern chapter divisions. About 20 illuminated sister-leaves are known, including two in the library at the University of Colorado at Boulder (Kidd, 2021).

REFERENCES

F. Avril, ‘À quand remontent les premiers ateliers d’enlumineurs laïcs à Paris?’, Les dossiers de l’archéologie, 16 (1976), pp. 36–44.

R. Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris During the Reign of Saint Louis: A Study of Styles (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1977), pp. 27–29, 201–02.

P. Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, III (London, 2021), no. 16.