Pope Gregory IX receiving his Decretals from Raymond of Pennafort, pointing to the same codex, and a congregation worshipping in church, three miniatures on cuttings from an illuminated Decretals of Gregory IX, manuscript on vellum [Northern Italy (Bologna), first two decades of the fourteenth century]

three cuttings together, 200mm. by 97mm., showing (i) Gregory IX as a bearded bishop being presented with the Decretals by Raymond of Pennafort (whom he had commanded in 1230 to produce the work), all before the papal court and a burnished gold background; (ii) Gregory IX seated and pointing to the same volume, before a blue background heightened with white penwork; (iii) the congregation of a church kneeling before the altar as tonsured monks sing from a choirbook on a raised lectern and another monk lifts up the host; laid down on thin board together, upper and lower borders of board painted to unite all three cuttings, some small scuffs in places, and small areas of edges of miniatures lost, else good and presentable condition, nineteenth-century chalk “525” and pen “24v” and “2, 6/6/-” on reverse of board, framed

From the Ian Woodner collection; sold Christies, 2 July 1991, lot 67 (and there misidentified as from a “Confirmation of the Rule of the Carmelites by the Patriarch of Jerusalem”).

 

These miniatures are early works by an artist closely associated with Modenese Grasolfi, described by Robert Gibbs as the Master of Genoa Antiphonary N (‘Antifonario N: a Bolognese choirbook in the context of Genoese illumination between 1285 and 1385’, Convegno Internazionale, Tessuti, Oreficerie, Miniature in Liguria, Genoa-Bordighera, 1999, pp. 247-78), who also produced the main miniatures in Oxford, Bodleian, Canon. Bibl. lat 57, and may have evolved later into the artist known as the 1314 Master.