THE MARTYRDOM OF ST MAURICE AND HIS COMPANIONS, historiated initial on a leaf from a Breviary, in Latin and French [Paris, c.1340-50]

THE MARTYRDOM OF ST MAURICE AND HIS COMPANIONS, historiated initial on a leaf from a Breviary, in Latin and French [Paris, c.1340-50]

A sparkling example of 14th-century Parisian illumination: a leaf from what would once have been a luxury manuscript painted by artists working in the style of the great Jean Pucelle.

c.270 x 190mm. A historiated initial 'D' ('Dioclecianus i[m]perator audiens'), 28 lines in two columns, written space: c.160 x 110mm, the text containing the 7th reading for the feast of St Matthew and the first three readings of St Maurice and his companions (the inner margin with two small cuts, some marginal staining and creasing). Mounted and framed. Provenance: This leaf comes from a luxury Breviary of Dominican use, made in Paris after 1323 (Thomas Aquinas is included as a saint). Several leaves from this manuscript are known, including four bifolia in the Comites Latentes collection, Geneva; 10 leaves at the Lilly Library, Bloomington (see de Ricci, Census, I, p.624 no 44); a bifolium with the end of the feast of Maurice, which begins on the present leaf, in an English private collection; and 85 more leaves divided between Besançon (Bibl. mun., ms. 55), Lyon (Bibl. mun., ms. 6020), and London (BL, Egerton 3035). The BL portion was owned by John Ruskin (d. 1900).

The style of illumination is that of a follower of Jean Pucelle, one of the finest and most influential Parisian illuminators of the early 14th century. A Bible Moralisée made for Jean le Bon, King of France from 1350 until his death in 1364, dates from the 1340s and was illuminated by no less than 15 artists working in Pucelle's style (Paris, BnF, fr.167; see F. Avril, 'Un chef-d'œuvre de l'enluminure sous le règne de Jean le Bon', Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot, 58, 1972, pp. 91-125).