THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST in a historiated initial, with the Harrowing of Hell and the Noli Me Tangere in the bas-de-page, on a leaf from a Missal, in Latin, on vellum. [France (probably Paris), 14th century (c. 1320s)]

THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST in a historiated initial, with the Harrowing of Hell and the Noli Me Tangere in the bas-de-page, on a leaf from a Missal, in Latin, on vellum

[France (probably Paris), 14th century (c. 1320s)]

a leaf, c. 305 × 195mm, written in two columns of 26 lines, c. 210 × 150mm, in two sizes of formal gothic script, rubrics in red and liturgical instructions underlined in red, comprising most of the mass for Easter Day (the text on the verso extending as far as the rubric for the postcommunion), illuminated with a LARGE HISTORIATED INITIAL with elaborate extensions and a THREE-SIDED BORDER ENCLOSING TWO BAS-DE-PAGE SCENES, ANIMALS, BIRDS, DROLLERIES, ETC., two-line initials alternately gold with dense penwork mainly in blue with some red, or in blue with dense penwork mainly in red with some blue, similar one-line initials; generally in good condition but with pinholes in the extreme corners, a small tear at the top, a small original hole in the lower margin, the extremities of decoration cropped, and with some residue of black paper and glue on the reverse; in a double-sided frame.

PROVENANCE

1. The parent volume has not been identified; only one other leaf is known, with a historiated initial for the feast of St John the Baptist, in a private collection in New Jersey.
2. Bruce Ferrini (1950–2010), manuscript dealer, of Akron, Ohio: with his pencilled stock number ‘VM 6521’; exhibited by Bruce Ferrini and Sam Fogg in London, Tokyo, and Nagoya, 1988–89; bought from Sam Fogg in April 1990 by:
3. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1303.

TEXT

This was doubtless the first leaf of the Temporale in the Summer part of a two-volume Missal, which would have consisted of the moveable feasts from Easter to the week before Advent, and would have been followed by the Sanctorale for the same period (including the 24 June feast of St John the Baptist, see Provenance) and preceded by a calendar. The leaf begins with a full column of liturgical directions about the masses to be said during the week of Easter and other days until Ascension, and the text of the Easter Mass itself begins in the second column ‘Resurrexi et adhuc tecum sum …’ (I am risen and I am always with you).

ILLUMINATION

The historiated initial shows the moment when Jesus emerged from his tomb (here shown, as usual, as a sarcophagus rather than as a cave with a stone to block the entrance), blessing and holding a cross-topped staff, while the three soldiers who had been ordered by Pilate to guard the tomb for three days (Matthew 27:62–66) sleep in the foreground. In the bas-de-page is a preceding and a following event: to the right Christ rescues Adam and Eve, and other Blessed, from the jaws of hell (a non-biblical event, described in the 5th-century Gospel of Nicodemus), while to the left he is met by Mary Magdalene in the garden, after his Resurrection, and he tells her not to touch him (‘Noli me tangere’; John 20:14–18). In all three scenes the wounds in his hands and feet are visible.

The illumination has been attributed to the circle of Jean Pucelle (Ferrini & Fogg, 1988), the great innovator who revolutionised French illumination between c. 1320 and his death in 1334; and while it is true that the work was made in his orbit, the quality is not as good as the best of which the master himself was capable (as is true of many manuscripts attributed to Pucelle), as can be seen by a comparison of the present Resurrection initial with several other examples of the same scene published by François Avril in 1970 and Nigel Morgan in 2007. Yet as Jeffrey Hamburger has argued, ‘disparities of style occurred not only within Pucelle’s immediate circle, but also within a single manuscript … a broad stylistic range should be accepted as the norm for manuscripts produced in Pucelle’s orbit’ (Hamburger, 1981, p. 256). The issue of Pucelle’s collaborators and imitators is studied at length in a volume edited by Kyunghee Pyun and Anna Russakoff (2013).

REFERENCES

F. Avril, ‘Trois manuscrits de l’entourage de Jean Pucelle’, Revue de l’art, 3 no. 9 (1970), pp. 37–48.

F. Avril, L’Enluminure a la cour de France au XIV^e siècle (Paris, 1978), pp. 9–10; English edn.: Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: The Fourteenth Century (1310–1380) (New York, 1978), pp. 13–14.

J. Hamburger, ‘The Waddesdon Psalter and the Shop of Jean Pucelle’, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte, 44 no. 3 (1981), pp. 243–57

Bruce Ferrini and Sam Fogg, Medieval & Renaissance Miniature Painting, catalogue by S. Hindman of an exhibition held in London, November–December 1988, and Tokyo and Nagoya, February–March 1989 (Akron, OH, and London, 1988), no. 21 (‘Jean Pucelle, circle of (Paris, c.1325)’).

N. Morgan, ‘A French Franciscan Breviary in Lisbon and the Breviaries by Jean Pucelle and his Followers’, in Quand la peinture était dans les livres: mélanges en l’honneur de François Avril à l’occasion de la remise du titre de docteur honoris causa de la Freie Universität Berlin, ed. by M. Hofmann and C. Zöhl (Turnhout and Paris, 2007), pp. 203–21.

Jean Pucelle: Innovation and Collaboration in Manuscript Painting, ed. by K. Pyun and A.D. Russakoff (London, 2013).