Lot 32
  • 32

THREE MINIATURES FROM AN ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT MEDITATIONS ON THE PASSION, IN LATIN, ON VELLUM

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Description

three miniatures, c.89mm. by 65mm., showing the locations of events of the Passion in burnished gold, blue, orange, green and grey, (a) the mocking of Christ, with Christ blindfolded and tormented by three men, seen through an open archway in a wall, labelled ‘Domus cayphe’, to the left an orange building labelled ‘carcer domini’, and in the background green hills and two houses with blue tiled roofs labelled ‘Domus anne’ and ‘Domus herodis’; (b) Christ carrying the Cross in the foreground, labelled ‘porta edu[ce]onis’ watched by the Virgin and St.John and two men, another man beating him with a flail, in the background St.Veronica with her handkerchief to the left, labelled ‘veronica’, to the right three men watching through an arched window in a house with a blue tiled roof, labelled ‘ubi marci obviavit’ , in a landscape; (c) the Crucifixion in a rocky landscape, the Virgin and St.John to the left, labelled ‘ubi maria sedebat’, and scattered houses labelled ‘sepulchrum adam’, ‘ubi corpus depositur’ etc., a walled city in the background, on the reverse of each leaf a litany of the places of the Passion, 15-20 lines, written in a gothic bookhand, capitals touched red, vellum somewhat darkened and slightly stained, otherwise in good condition, mounted

Catalogue Note

From the collection of Dr. Ludwig Roselius (1874-1943), the inventor of de-caffinated coffee. The majority of the Roselius collection went in to the Ludwig-Roselius-Museum für Frühgeschichte in Bremen. The colourful and dramatic style is typical of German popular art of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The angular outlines and stiffly-drawn figures suggest a relationship to contemporary woodcuts.