Caesar’s Victory and the Death of Ptolemy, miniature from an illuminated Boccaccio, Du cas des nobles hommes et femmes, in the French translation of Laurent de Premierfait, on vellum [northern France (probably Troyes), c.1470]

a cutting, 105mm. by 79mm., with a column-wide miniature of the Victory of Caesar during the Siege of Alexandria and the Death of Ptolemy, Boccaccio at the left gesturing towards a battle scene at a riverbank, with Ptolemy lying on the ground and a priest standing behind him, the dead body being attacked by Caesar’s soldiers (Ptolemy drowned when he attempted to cross the river), painted in muted colours and liquid gold, the verso with 17 lines of text from Book VI, ch.11, in a fine gothic bookhand, one paragraph mark in gold with blue pen-flourishing, trimmed to edges of miniature, remains of burnished gold border, pigment losses in the sky and the landscape

Christie’s, Old Master Drawings, 8 December 1981, lot 98 and in our rooms, 2 December 2003, lot 25, to the present owner.

The parent manuscript of the present cutting was dismembered by the nineteenth century and a cutting was to be found in the collection of William Horatio Crawford (1812-88) of Lakelands. The surviving fragments suggest that the manuscript had a large half-page miniature introducing each of the nine books and small single-column miniatures for each chapter, and cuttings have since emerged in our sales: 11 April 1961, lot 96; 10 July 1967, lot 9 (re-offered in Les Enluminures, cat.1, 1992, no.26); 29 November 1990, lots 35-37; 3 cuttings from the Breslauer collection (Voekle and Wieck, 1992, nos.5-7), offered by Les Enluminures in 2004; 2 more in Les Enluminures, cat.3, 1995, no.25; and four are in the holdings of Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet (RP-T-1888-A-1463, 1464, 1465, 1466), and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library (M.1057). The style of the miniatures points to Troyes although it is reminiscent of that of the Parisian Coëtivy Master whose style was imported to Troyes by the Master of the Glazier Hours, when he temporarily worked there (Avril and Reynaud, Manuscrits à Peintures, 1993, p.181).