Acta Sanctorum in Beneventan minuscule

A highlight from our December auction is this leaf from a very large copy of the Acta Sanctorum in Beneventan minuscule, with a monumental decorated initial 'T'.

The present manuscript is the sister leaf of that sold in our 2 July auction this year (lot 1), and the publishing of that leaf led to the subsequent rediscovery of this one. The reemergence of this leaf enables us to see the scale of the decoration of the parent codex, and its survival on a bookboard with a paper pastedown allows us to conclude that the parent manuscript had left Montecassino and travelled to Bergamo on the northernmost border of Italy or one of its neighbour-towns on the other side of the Alps, either Gurk or Gratz, by 1500/1502 when it was reused on a binding. 

Like its sister leaf, this is a large and fine example of early Beneventan minuscule, the strange and visually confounding Dark Age script formed from curling letterforms, broken lines and reliance on early medieval abbreviations, but what is of especial note here is its large Romanesque initial. This initial stands quite apart from the long and thin initials encased within whip-like vines more common in Beneventan books.

Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, in the epitome of Ludovicus de Guastis

Pliny the Elder (more properly Gaius Plinius Secundus; 23-79 AD.) is perhaps the most well known naturalist of the Ancient World. The present work was probably completed in 77 AD., but not released until the last two months of the authors life, and represents decades of dedicated research from his native Italy as well as his travels in Germania, Africa, northern Hispania and probably also Gallia Belgica.

It is one of the single largest works to survive from the Roman Empire, and claims to be the first such work of its kind, aiming to encompass all fields of knowledge at that time, and surveying astronomy, botany, geology, mineralogy and zoology, and making note of the technologies involved in mining and the use of water mills for grinding corn. It is the only work of its period to describe the work of artists, and so is the eventual ancestor for almost every following encyclopedist, as well as commentators on art such as Vasari.

The Barbarigo Orosius

This text is perhaps the most important record of the history of the Western Church and Christendom during the final collapse of the overstretched Roman Empire, and its later parts are a crucial narrative for barbarian invasions of Rome and the birth of the medieval world.

Its author was a student of Augustine of Hippo who worked with him on the City of God, and wrote this text as a response to Augustines call for a history of the pagan nations to complement his own work. Rome had been sacked by the Visigothic forces of Alaric I in 410, perhaps some six or seven years before the composition of this work, and thus the main purpose of this text was to show that Romes decadence, not their recent conversion to Christianity, had led to their own destruction. It is, in essence, a survey of the calamities of the West, at pains to show that these could have been worse and that life had been substantially improved by the introduction of Christianity. In doing so, Orosius produced the first historical work that tried to show God as a guide to humanity, and rewrote the methodologies of Graeco-Roman history writing in the process, creating the base method of historical writing for the entire Middle Ages.

Book of Hours, Use of Paris

Despite the selection of small miniatures to open the Hours of the Virgin (an apparent attempt to economise on the commission) this volume has an impressive array of decoration. In addition to the Calendar with its twenty-four marginal miniatures, the book has twenty-seven small miniatures and five large miniatures, all by a skilled artist who worked in Paris in the years after the 1420s and 1430s.

There is much here from the early decades of the fifteenth century, including the trees set on grassy mounds at the corners of the bas-de-page of some miniatures, as well as the intertwined frames of the roundels of the Calendar with their interstitial spaces filled with gold, which echo those of the Bedford Master, and the tall and angular stylised flowers in the bas-de-page of some of the large miniatures, which are close to the work of the Dunois Master. Some of these features were reborn in the midpoint of the fifteenth century in the work of the Maître Francois and the Maître de Rambures, and our artist's human figures, with their oval faces, drooping noses and eyes formed by black dots hanging down from single-stroke eyelids, are of that period.

AUCTION DATE & LOCATION
Tuesday 3 December | 10.30am
67 Pall Mall, St James's, London SW1Y 5ES

VIEWING AT BLOOMSBURY AUCTIONS:
16-17 Pall Mall, St, James's, London SW1Y 5LU
Friday 29 November: 9.30am-5.30pm
Saturday 30 November: 11am-4pm
Sunday 1 December: 11am-4pm
Monday 2 December: 9.30am-5.30pm
Day of sale: from 9.30am

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