St. Martin sharing his cloak with a crippled beggar, a historiated initial from an Antiphonary, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Rhineland (Cologne), early fourteenth century]

a cutting, 185mm. by 130mm., with a historiated initial ‘H’ in blue with white penwork decoration with foliate extensions with red and green ivy leaves framed in burnished gold, enclosing St. Martin on horseback, cutting his cloak in two and giving half of it to a poor man with amputated feet, all before a silver chequered background, the reverse with three 3-line brown staves, rastrum 11mm., within a grid ruled in red, music and text in a gothic hand, capitals decorated in red, rubrics in red, illumination slightly rubbed, silver partly oxidised, otherwise in good condition, trimmed to edges, framed

The elegant initial was painted by a follower of Johannes von Valkenburg, who is recorded as a scribe and illuminator in the Franciscan friary of Cologne c.1299. The title pages of two Cologne Franciscan Graduals (Bonn, Universitatsbibliothek, MS.384 and Cologne, Diözesanbibliothek, MS.1B) bear his name and portrait, and record that he in part wrote, noted and illuminated them. His work represents the stylistic relationship between the art of Cologne and Paris in the Gothic period. It seems, however, that he developed his style from a series of earlier Cologne manuscripts from c.1280 (Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MSS.41 and 111) that were also made for Franciscan use and were in turn influenced by contemporary Mosan manuscripts (see J. Oliver in Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, 40, 1978, pp.23-37). The continuation of his style was motivated by the founding of a convent for the Franciscan sisters of Saint Clare in Cologne in 1304 (see C. Nordenfalk, Medieval and Renaissance Miniatures, 1975, pp.131-3). The convent of sisters produced a number of manuscripts in the French courtly manner during the first half of the fourteenth century. It may be that this cutting with St. Martin belongs to this group.