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The Annunciation to the Virgin on a cutting from an illuminated choirbook in Czech, on vellum [Czech Bohemia, c.1500]
Estimate
4,000 - 6,000 GBP
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Description
- Vellum
a cutting, 160mm. by 150mm., with a large initial 'A' in scrolling brown acanthus leaves heightened in liquid gold, enclosing the Virgin turning her gaze to meet the viewer, kneeling at her prie-dieu with an open book as an angel with red, blue and yellow wings approaches from the left and gestures towards her, on brightly burnished gold grounds and within a soft green frame, nine lines of Czech on reverse in angular script with ornamental cadels (an apparent encomium to the Virgin), capitals touched in yellow, one paragraph mark and initial in red, in excellent condition, in card mount
Provenance
Offered for sale in our rooms 10 July 1967, lot 38; and again on 24 June 1980, lot 10, to Maggs.
Catalogue Note
Czech manuscripts do not commonly come to the market, and those in the vernacular are of breathtaking rarity. J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) owned a Bible in Czech, dated 1456 (now New York, Morgan Library and Museum, M.752), and Dyson Perrins had a Book of Hours in Czech, dated 1465 (his sale in our rooms, 9 December 1958, lot 24), as well as a vast Bible dated 1421, with a few words of Czech on a single leaf in its prefactory material (his sale in our rooms, 29 November 1960, lot 118, and again on 17 June 2003, lot 15). A single sixteenth-century choirbook leaf in Czech appeared in Quaritch cat.1147, Bookhands of the Middle Ages V (1991), item 72.