Description
three cuttings: each approximately 220mm. by 190mm.: (a) Reason debating with Virtue as Fortune spins her wheel, large square miniature, 147mm. by 152mm., with Reason as a woman in blue robes, seated and pointing to Virtue who enters from right with a female companion, to the left Fortune with one half of her face black, the other white, in a gold and coloured striped dress, lifting up a cane to spin her wheel of fortune, bringing the king, the bishop and the abbot seated at its top crashing to the ground, all before a hilly landscape with a castle and a medieval town, border on three sides of coloured acanthus leaves and golden flowers and fruit enclosing a griffon and a guinea-fowl, laid down on board and in elaborately carved nineteenth-century gilt frame; (b) Reason and Fortune debate, while Fortune looks on, 150mm. by 160mm., the three figures as before seated before a castle on top of a hill between a lush forest and a dead one, ships massing in the background as the winds blow (here as 7 cherubs pursing their lips), borders as before with a spotted cat and an ape on crutches, leaf loose from board, with remains of two columns with 29 lines of lettre bâtarde on verso, modern pencil “480”, gilt-frame as before; (c) Virtue gesturing at Fortune, before Reason, 152mm. by 155mm., before a very detailed castle with a tumbled-down turret and a golden wheel of fortune on its battlements, laid down on board and some spots and small chips to paint, else good condition, in gilt frame as before
Catalogue Note
These miniatures are all that remain of an otherwise unrecorded manuscript of Martin le Franc (1410-61),
L’Estrif de Fortune et de Vertu, and almost certainly were the only miniatures in that lost volume. The text is a debate between the allegorical figures of Reason, Virtue and Fortune which draws on Classical Roman literature for its examples of good and bad behaviour. The author was a priest closely connected to the House of Savoy, then a personal secretary to the antipope Felix V and finally an ambassador to the Burgundian court of Phillip the Good. Dembowski records 30 other manuscripts (
L’Estrif de Fortune et Vertu, 1999, pp. xxi-xxviii), and to these should be added that sold in our rooms, 13 July 1977, lot 49 (recently reoffered by Jörn Günther: his cat.8,
Fifty Manuscripts and Miniatures, 2006, no.23).
The rich palette, the composition of the miniatures, and the opulent drapery (especially that of Fortune’s spiralling striped dress) are near-identical to those of a manuscript of the same text painted by the young Bourdichon c.1475 (now St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS. Fr.F.v.XV,6: reproduced Jean Fouquet: peintre et enlumineur du XVe siècle, 2003, no.46, pp.375-77). Certain figures, such as that of Fortune with her large white headdress on leaf (a) here and Reason on leaf (b) clearly draw on the same patterns as the St. Petersburg manuscript. The image of Fortune’s tall wheel here with figures tumbling from it is markedly close to two miniatures in a copy of Des cas de nobles homes et femmes, illuminated by Jean Fouquet and the Master of the Munich Boccaccio between 1459-60 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibl. Cod. Gall.6: ibid., no.32, pp.272-307, esp. 284 and 295).
