Job in bed displaying his skin afflictions, on a leaf from a manuscript Antiphoner on parchment [Tuscany (probably Florence), mid-fourteenth century (probably c. 1340)]

Job in bed displaying his skin afflictions, in a large historiated initial, with a border with a human drummer and a naked bearded drollery with human heads for hands, all by the Secondo Maestro del Breviario Strozzi 11, on a leaf from a manuscript Antiphoner on parchment [Tuscany (probably Florence), mid-fourteenth century (probably c. 1340)]

Single vast leaf, with a large initial S (opening Si bona suscepimus …, a responsory for the funeral service), in dark blue acanthus leaves shaded with white brushstrokes, other coloured acanthus leaves making up the remaining parts of the letter, and with coloured knots and gold fruit at junctions, all on a blue ground with teal green and red frame, the upper compartment enclosing Job as a bearded man in a red skullcap, reclining half-naked on a bed exposing his boils and blemishes while a female attendant inclines towards him, all before a burnished gold background, the lower compartment with an angular boss-like four petalled flower on burnished gold ground, simple coloured foliage around a coloured bar with curls of leaves enclosing gold or coloured grounds and a bezant filling most of inner border and all of lower border, with a naked bearded human drollery with 2 human heads for arms, a drummer wearing a coif and a bearded human face set within the foliage, large red initials set within ornate blue penwork, red rubrics, 5 lines of text (written space 445 by 300mm.) with music on a 4-line red stave (rastrum: 48mm.), original number I in margin, as well as later pen pagination set in outer margin adjacent to second stave (perhaps eighteenth century, here 25 and 26; other known leaves with same hand in same place: Sothebys: 6 and presumably 5, Amedeo: 111 and presumably 112), remains of old and perhaps Italian paper label at foot (much missing, but 44[3] visible), folds at head and foot of blank margins, some darkening in places and cockling, with small losses to paintwork in lower margin (this common to other leaves from this codex), 622 by 450mm.

A hitherto unrecorded leaf from this fascinating dispersed antiphoner, with a rare composition of Job as bed-ridden patient afflicted by skin diseases. The first leaf to come to light did so in Sothebys, 19 June 1990, lot 34 (with full page illustration), but the artist was not identified and named, and the remaining examples of his work not drawn together for study, until the publication of F. Todini, La Spezia. Museo Civico Amedeo Lia Miniature, in 1996 (pp. 232-38, which focussed on another leaf almost certainly from the same codex). Todini identified the original parent manuscript as one once in the church of San Francesco di Pisa, which had left that community and seems to have been dispersed in the eighteenth century, partly in England.

The Secondo Maestro del Breviario Strozzi 11 follows the finest conventions of Florentine work of the mid-fourteenth century, and shares his detailed facial expressions and sparsely populated borders inhabited by tall and thin human figures with other contemporary Florentine masters such as Pacino di Bonaguida, the Master of the Dominican Effigies and the Master of the Montepulciano Gradual (formerly Master of Antiphonary of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas; see Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350, 2012, pp. 252-81 & 310-11, 316-19 & 322-5, as well as our sale 6 July 2017, lot 62, and references there). However, what sets him apart from these other artists are his pinched and pensive human faces, as well as his riotously inventive border decorations with long-muzzled dragons and strange even alarming human drolleries such as here.