THE DESTRUCTION OF TROY: a full-page coloured drawing from Sigismund Meisterlein's Augsburg Chronik, in German, written (and illuminated?) by Conrad Vaihinger, illustrated manuscript on paper. [Germany (Augsburg)], dated 1490

THE DESTRUCTION OF TROY: a full-page coloured drawing from Sigismund Meisterlein's Augsburg Chronik, in German, written (and illuminated?) by Conrad Vaihinger, illustrated manuscript on paper

[Germany (Augsburg)], dated 1490

a cutting, c. 205 × 150mm, the reverse apparently unruled, written in 2 columns of 30 and 34 lines in bastard script (‘priester der syge … geschreiben hand’), the front with a miniature depicting a city with a bridge over a moat, with a broken gateway and a falling tower, being plundered by men who carry off boxes and sacks of loot, some wearing armour, one entering a tent outside the city; numbered ‘5’ in modern pencil at the bottom; in very fine condition; framed.

PROVENANCE

1. FROM A MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN IN 1490 BY CONRAD VAIHINGER, which must have been cut-up by 1835, when the first of eight cuttings was acquired by the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett; their other seven, including a cutting that provides the the name of the scribe (and presumed illuminator), was acquired in 1856.
2. This previously unknown cutting sold in our rooms, 5 December 2017, lot 18 (col. ill.); bought by:
3. The Boehlen Collection, Bern, MS 1439.

TEXT AND SISTER LEAVES

This is one of a series of illustrations for the Augsburg Chronik of Sigismund Meisterlein, a monk of the monastery of Sts Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, written by him in Latin in 1457, but soon followed by a series of manuscript German translations, of which five were illustrated. The present copy includes the name of the scribe on a cutting at Berlin, and his name and the year 1490, are on one of the cuttings whose whereabouts are unknown. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt (1929, pp. 212–19 and pls. 90–100), traced 22 leaves from the same manuscript:

• Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 1050 (1 cutting, from the collection of Carl Ferdinand Friedrich von Nagler (1770–1846); Wescher, 1931, p. 218)
• Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 4073-4079 (7 cuttings, from the von Radowitz collection; Wescher, pp. 218–19)
• Paris, Ecole des Beaux-arts, Masson mn. 204–209 (6 cuttings)
• Frankfurt, Städel, Inv.-Nr.14399 (1 cutting)
• Haarlem, Coll. Franz Königs (1 cutting; missing since World War II).
• Whereabouts unknown (6 cuttings): formerly Eugène Rodriguez, Paris, 1853; his sale in Amsterdam, 11–13 March 1921, lot 241; Robert von Hirsch, Frankfurt (Swarzenski & Schilling, 1929, no. 199); his sale in our rooms, 20 June 1978, lot 7 (col. and b&w ills); Kraus, 1981, no. 24; Stuttgart private collection, notified as stolen in 1996.

Lehmann-Haupt did not know the present leaf, and another previously unrecorded leaf was sold at Christie's, 26 June 1996, lot 5, subsequently offered by Jörn Günther (1997, no. 31), and exhibited by him in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, in 1988.

REFERENCES

H. Lehmann-Haupt, Schwäbische Federzeichnungen: Studien zur Buchillustration Augsburgs im XV. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1929).

G. Swarzenski and R. Schilling, Die illuminierten Handschriften und Einzelminiaturen des Mittelalters und Renaissance in Frankfurter Besitz (Frankfurt, 1929).

P. Wescher, Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der Miniaturen … des Kupferstichkabinetts der Staatlichen Museen Berlin (Leipzig, 1931).

H.P. Kraus, Catalogue 159: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1981).

Dr Jörn Günther Antiquariat, Katalog 5: Handschriften und Miniaturen aus dem deutschen Sprachgebiet (Hamburg, 1997), no. 31.

Dr Jörn Günther Antiquariat, Blicke in verborgene Schatzkammern: Mittelalterliche Handschriften und Miniaturen aus Hamburger Sammlungen (Hamburg, 1998), no. 53.