Mystical Lamb of the Apocalypse, illuminated cutting [Italy, (Lucca, ca 1400)]

provenance: (1) Probably from a manuscript commissioned for a religious house in Lucca by Nicolò di Lazaro Guinigi, archbishop of Lucca from 1394–1402 and 1432–35: one of the sister-cuttings has the unfinished Lazaro Guinigi arms, suggesting that the volume may have been in course of illumination when Nicolò was expelled from the archbishopric in 1402 (Voelkle & Wieck, 1992, p. 182). (2) JAMES DENNISTOUN (1803–1855), Scottish antiquary and connoisseur of Italian primitives, of Dennistoun and Edinburgh, who spent from 1836 to 1847 travelling and collecting art in Italy. He formed a collection of more than a hundred leaves and cuttings bound into a red morocco album, which included his attributions and notes on their acquisition. The present cutting was one of a group of 39 cuttings which, he recorded, he acquired at Lucca in 1838 and came from the Charterhouse there, although the presence of a sister-initial depicting St Thomas Aquinas suggests that he or his informant may have been mistaken and the parent volume may instead have come from the Dominican house, San Romano. The album passed by descent to his nephew, James Wallis Dennistoun, and then to the latter’s daughter: (3) Isabella ‘Ella’ Caroline Henson née Dennistoun (1869–1949), whose husband later became bishop of Durham; bought from her circa 1930 by: (4) LORD KENNETH CLARK (1903–1983), art historian, museum director, and broadcaster, of Saltwood Castle, Kent: some cuttings were removed from the album and framed, and a series of 18 cuttings from a choirbook with Bolognese illumination, but apparently made for the Certosa at Lucca, and with the arms of the bishop of Lucca, Nicolò di Lazzaro Guinigi (cf. above), were sold in our rooms, 18 June 1962, lot 125 (for the most recent and detailed discussion of this group, see Medica, 2021, no. 30); the rest of the album was disassembled and sold in the Clark sale in our rooms, 3 July 1984, the present cutting being the third of five cuttings in lot 93 (with full-page pl.), bought by: (5) Bernard Hartmut Breslauer (1918–2004), book dealer of, successively, Berlin, Florence, London, and New York: he kept three items from the lot (Voelkle and Wieck, 1992, nos. 67–69, citing the present cutting at p. 181), and sold the other two, the present one being offered in his Catalogue 109 (1988), no. 2, with a clipping from the catalogue stuck to the back of the frame; bought by: (6) T. Kimball Brooker.

illumination:

Stylistic analysis is hampered by the absence of human figures and drapery in the initial, but comparisons with other members of the group are still possible. The manner of decorating the blue background with white ornament, the way in which this blue background ‘sky’ is framed by an arc like a yellow-green rainbow (often found in works by Sienese artists including Andrea di Bartolo), and the leaf-forms of the foliage that springs from and wraps around the initial for example, are all precisely paralleled in the cutting depicting The Decollation of St John the Baptist, tentatively attributed by Volekle & Wieck (1992, p. 181) to Martino di Bartolomeo (ca 1365/70 – ca 1435), a Sienese panel painter and illuminator active in Lucca in the 1390s (on whom see Labriola, 2004). He is documented as having been commissioned in 1394 by Niccolò Guinigi to illuminate Graduals for the cathedral of Lucca, of which five volumes are still in the city (Opera del Duomo, MSS 1, 7, 9, 10, and Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 8; on which see Ciatti, 1982, 1983; Baracchini & Caleca, 1973, figs. 786–815; and De Benedictis, 2002). Milvia Bollati sees the present artist as an emulator of Martino (1998), which would be fully in accord with a slightly later date than the Graduals of the Duomo. Gaudenz Freuler (2018) also draws parallels with works by Angelo Puccinelli, who is documented in Lucca before 1406. In summary, on the available evidence it seems probable that the illuminator of the present cutting worked in the orbit of Martino di Bartolomeo when he was illuminating Graduals for Lucca Cathedral in the mid-1390s, and worked on the present Antiphonary initial about five years later.

Other cuttings from the same set, recently on the art market, include:

– The Assumption of the Virgin, sale in our rooms, 6 July 2010, lot 15

– Sts Philip & James and Sts Peter & Paul, Koller, 18 September 2015, lot 130

The acquisition of the cutting and its siblings by Lord Clark is related by John Pope-Hennessy in his autobiography (1991, pp. 28–29): ‘At Auckland Castle, seat of the bishop of Durham, the dining room was filled with twelve life-size paintings by Zurbarán … When Kenneth Clark came up to stay, I drove him over to see them. A tea party was in progress, and we sneaked away to look at other rooms. One of them was decorated with excised illuminations attached with drawing pins to velvet mounts. I asked the bishop's wife, Mrs. Hensley-Henson, about them through her ear-trumpet. “We call them Uncle Denny’s scraps,” she said, and they proved indeed to have been collected by James Dennistoun … Negotiating for them afterwards, Kenneth Clark landed the whole collection (and very splendid it was; it included a quantity of illuminations by Niccolò da Bologna and many other miniatures of first rate quality)’.

references:

Clara Baracchini and Antonino Caleca, Il Duomo di Lucca (Lucca, 1973). 

Marco Ciatti, ‘Martino di Bartolomeo’, in Il gotico a Siena: miniature, pitture, oreficerie, oggeti d’arte. Siena, Palazzo Pubblico 24 Iuglio – 30 ottobre 1982, Firenze, 1982 (Florence, 1982), and

L’art gothique siennois: enluminure, peinture, orfèvrerie, sculpture: Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, 26 juin – 2 octobre 1983 (Florence, 1983), pp. 302–03, and cat. no. 111 by Anne-Marie Doré. 

Milvia Bollati, ‘La miniatura al tiempo di Paolo Guinigi’, in Museo nazionale di Villa Guinigi (exh. cat.), Sumptuosa tabula picta: pittori a Lucca tra gotico e Rinascimento, ed. by Maria Teresa Filieri (Livorno, 1998), pp. 64–75, reproducing the present initial as fig 60 (‘ubicazione scosciuta’). 

Ada Labriola, ‘Martino di Bartolomeo’, in the above, catalogue entries at pp. 208 – 214. 

Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, Learning to Look (London, 1991). 

William M. Voelkle and Roger S. Wieck, The Bernard H. Breslauer Collection of Manuscript Illuminations, exh. cat., Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1992), nos. 67–69. 

La miniatura senese, 1270–1420, ed. by Cristina De Benedictis (Skira, 2002), pp. 348–52. 

Ada Labriola, ‘Martino di Bartolomeo’, in Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani: secoli IX–XVI, ed. by Milvia Bollati (Milan, 2004), pp. 740-42. 

Gaudenz Freuler, The McCarthy Collection, I: Italian and Byzantine Miniatures (London, 2018), no. 68.

Massimo Medica, in The Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Paintings, ed. by Sandra Hindman and Federica Toniolo (London, 2021), no. 30.