A Venetian governor in adoration of the Virgin and Child with a standing saint and the governor’s patron saint, Anthony Abbot, the frontispiece for a Commissione, on vellum [northern Italy (Venice), c.1540 or c.1570]

single leaf, 231mm. by 162mm., with a very large Renaissance miniature of the Virgin and Child seated before fine marble columns and architecture and a wide hilly landscape, accompanied by a saint holding a book and St. Anthony Abbot holding a burning flame, the latter introducing the Venetian governor (shown in his 51st year of age, as specified in the blue compartment in the lower centre: “ANNO AETATIS SUE LI”), all within a frame of strapwork decorated with gold satyrs, nymphs, acanthus, flowers and the head of a lion (the traditional symbol of Venice), on red ground, leaf laid down on cardboard, remains of paper on edges from earlier framing, small scratches and areas of crackling, slightly faded overall, once folded with slight damage across the middle, in a late sixteenth-century north Italian wood frame with silver repoussée inlay, decorated with vines of paradise and grotesques, with some later restorations

From the collection of Leopold Hirsch (1867-1932), London financier and art collector on a grand scale; his sale, Christie’s, 11 May 1934, lot 83, bought back at the sale by his daughter, Ruth J. Emilie Hirsch, for £7, 7sh. She married the artist Thomas Esmond Lowinsky, and lived in Aldbourne, Wiltshire.

illumination

This is a remarkable frontispiece of great beauty from a Venetian Commissione, the contracts of duty and conduct for individual patricians elected to the highest offices in the Venetian state (cf. Szépe, ‘Civic and Artistic Identity in Illuminated Venetian Documents’, Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, 95, 2001, pp.59-78; and Chambers, ‘Merit and Money: The Procurators of St Mark and their Commissioni, 1443-1605’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60, 1997, pp.23-88). They were produced from the mid-fourteenth century to the fall of the Republic in the eighteenth century, with the most elegant examples (like the present leaf) from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The saint standing next to the Virgin and Child, who represents the Doge’s patron saint, prominently holds a large book in his hands, and is most probably St. Peter. He could refer to two sixteenth-centuries doges, Pietro Lando (1538-45) and Pietro Loredan (1567-70). As each one was meant to depict the officer receiving the appointment, they are the rarest thing in medieval manuscript art – portraiture from life.