‘BARI’ TYPE BENEVENTAN SCRIPT AND DECORATION: two fragments probably from a Homilary, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum. [Southern Italy or Dalmatia, 11th or early 12th century]

‘BARI’ TYPE BENEVENTAN SCRIPT AND DECORATION: two fragments probably from a Homilary, in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum

[Southern Italy or Dalmatia, 11th or early 12th century]

a nearly complete leaf and a half-leaf, c. 390 × 270mm and c. 210 × 270mm respectively, the former with two columns of 31 lines, c. 285 × 205mm, EACH WITH A LARGE ZOOMORPHIC DECORATED INITIAL CONSISTING OF BIRD- OR DRAGON-HEADS WITH LONG INTERLACING NECKS pen-drawn and painted in colours; the larger leaf lacking only a portion of the blank lower margin, the smaller fragment lacking the upper 15–16 lines of text and part of the lower margin, each with one or more horizontal creases and rust-stained pin-holes in the margins, somewhat worn but the text almost entirely legible.

PROVENANCE

1. The script has a number of letterforms and ligatures characteristic of the rarer ‘Bari’ type of Beneventan script practised mainly in Puglia and Dalmatia, which differs from the more common ‘Montecassino’ type by the absence of minims formed of lozenge-like strokes.
2. The leaves were still in Italy but apparently already fragmentary by the late Middle Ages when an inscription was added (now partly erased), apparently identifying the text: ‘ … a la cominchia secondo apistole, sic …’.
3. In Ireland and believed to be Irish by the 19th century: the fragments were formerly framed with a 5th/6th-century Anglo-Saxon cross (sold in our rooms, 5 December 2017, lot 1) and a descriptive label: ‘Portions of MSS of Sermons; written in the eleventh century; the initials are of Keltic design … These MSS are the work of an Irish scribe …’; sold in our rooms, 3 July 2018, lot 1; bought by:
4. The Boehlen Collection, Bern.

TEXT AND DECORATION

The larger leaf contains part of (Pseudo-)Augustine’s Sermo I on the Old and New Testaments (‘innocentem perimit gladio … videatur sibi aliquid dixisse: Sciebat’), with the large initial at ‘Debitum de quo supra curo solvere sermonem …’. The same sermon continues on the recto of the smaller fragment (‘pugnavit succubuit … Expoliatus divitiis’ and ‘ut propitietur tibi et vias … et in hoc calumniatur’); the first column on the verso has part of Sermo II (‘[iux]ta dicentis testimonium cohortando … dominus quodam modo’), and the last column has the beginning of Ambrose’s Homily on Luke 18:35, introduced by the large decorated initial at ‘Factum est autem cum appropinquasset Ihesus Hiericho …’ (preceded by a very cropped rubric ending ‘Ambrosii ep(iscop)i’, and ending at ‘ … medicinam an in [duobus]’; cf. Migne, Patrologia Latina, XV, col. 1790).

The most detailed description of ‘Bari type’ Beneventan script was published by E.A. Lowe in 1914, and the most recent is by Francis Newton (2021): ‘another superb form of Beneventan reached its apogee in the eleventh century … the Bari type flows evenly, smoothly, without drama’.

The spindly interlace initials of the present leaves, with their long-beaked heads, are very similar to those reproduced by Lowe (pls. VI–VIII) from ‘Bari type’ manuscripts.

Scraps of Beneventan script appear on the market every few years (e.g. in our rooms, 2 December 2014, lot 6), but large leaves with major decoration very rarely. The closest comparison we have been able to find are two smaller leaves from a Missal (bought by the Schøyen Collection from Quaritch, 1990), attributed to Puglia, late 11th century.

REFERENCES

E.A. Lowe, The Beneventan Script: A History of the South Italian Minuscule (Oxford, 1914), pp.150–52 (enlarged and edited by V. Brown, 1980)

Bernard Quaritch Ltd, Bookhands of the Middle Ages, Part IV: Beneventan Script (1990), no. 8, with colour plate and frontispiece.

F. Newton, ‘Beneventan (South Italian/Langobardic)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography, ed. by F.T. Coulson and R.G. Babcock (Oxford, 2021), pp. 121–42 at 131–33.