Lot 43

Vitae sanctorum, lives of the Holy Innocents and St. Sylvester, in Latin, manuscript on vellum [Italy (perhaps Tuscany), second quarter of the twelfth century]

Estimate

4,000 - 6,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Vellum

a bifolium, 393mm. by up to 256mm., two columns, 42 lines, a graceful round late Carolingian minuscule (praegothica textualis), opening and closing words in uncials and in compressed majuscules, a heading in bright red added probably in the fifteenth century, two large decorated initials (7 lines high or equivalent) in elaborate scrolling foliage, one with two birds, the initials apparently left unfinished awaiting colour and possibly gold, old folio numbers 211 and 212, slight defects to outer edge of the second leaf and a repair to the inner margin, the bifolium now folded insideout, so that fol. 2 originally preceded fol.1, hessian binding

Provenance

provenance

Bernard Rosenthal, bought in 1959 from Aldo Olschki (1893-1963); Quaritch, Bookhands III, cat.1088 (1988), no.18; Schøyen MS 93.

Catalogue Note

text

The text opens on fol.2 at the end of an account of the Holy Innocents (28 December) followed by the prologue to the life of Saint Sylvester (31 December; Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, 1898-99, p.1119, no.7725, with the variant ending of H. Fros, Novum Supplementum, 1986, p.788, no.7725a), followed by the life of Sylvester (fol.2v, continuing here onto fol.1; Bibl. Hag. Lat., p.1119, no.7726).

The large initials, drawn but left uncoloured, are strikingly similar to those in the twelfth-century pattern-book in the Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 83.1972; cf. M. Gullick, A Working Alphabet of Initial Letters from Twelfth-Century Tuscany, 1979.