Leaf from Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Peter Lombard, manuscript on vellum, [Italy (probably Florence), 15th century]

Property from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Leaf from Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book I

Manuscript in Latin on vellum. [Italy (probably Florence), 15th century (2nd half)]

Single leaf, c.285×212mm; written in a fine Italian Humanistic bookhand in 2 columns of 37 lines (175×130mm); initials and paraphs alternately red or blue; foliated in pencil 284; with wide, clean, margins: a handsome example of Humanistic book design

LITERATURE:

Sotheby’s, Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, 26 November 1985, lot 80

Scott Gwara, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (Cayce, SC, 2013), Handlist no. 40; citing leaves in seven American institutions, plus numerous owners of Ege’s portfolio of ‘Fifty Original Leaves’, in which leaves from this manuscript were no. 40.

PROVENANCE:

(1) Unidentified aristocratic patron, probably Tuscan, perhaps a member of the Lorenzi, Vannicini Pillotti, or Bonfigli families: the first leaf of the parent manuscript(at the Beinecke Library) bears the original arms: azure, 3 crescents or, between a chevron of the same.

(2) Tammaro de Marinis, Catalogue VIII: Manuscrits et livres rares (Florence, 1908), no. 3 and pl. IV.

(3) Davis & Orioli, Catalogue 41 (1926), no. 4, and Catalogue 44 (1927), no. 1.

(4) Unidentified American bookdealer: other leaves from the same manuscript, sold in these rooms in 1985, were accompanied by a clipping ‘from an American bookseller’s catalogue’, in which the manuscript was described as still intact.

(5) Otto Ege/Philip Duschnes, by 1941

(6) Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Gallery Purchase, 1942 (1942:468.9)