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[ENLUMINURE]. Leaf extracted from a Psalter, known as the "R…
See original version (French)
[ENLUMINURE]. Leaf extracted from a Psalter, known as the "R…
See original version (French)
Lot no. 3
[ENLUMINURE].
Leaf extracted from a Psalter, known as the "Rosenbaum Psalter".
In Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment.
[England, circa 1275 or Flanders or Rhineland-Meuse, circa 1275].
Size: 178 x 132 mm
Folio from a liturgical Psalter or Psalter Hours, 20 lines per page, gothic script in dark brown ink, endpapers with various bestiaries and drolleries, some ornamental motifs also in endpapers, drolleries drawn in red and blue ink, initials in blue or burnished gold, with red or blue filigree decoration, foliotation in pencil "116" in the upper right-hand corner. Very good condition, trimmed a little short in the upper margin.
Text: recto, Psalm 72:5-15; verso, Psalm 72:15-24.
The liturgical Psalter known as the "Rosenbaum Psalter" was dismembered in France in the 1960s (before 1966). We know that this manuscript originally also contained the Hours and an Office for the Dead: it is therefore a composite work known as the Hours-Psalter. It is named after the leaves of this manuscript that were kept for a time in the collection of Esther Rosenbaum (Chicago) and sold at Sotheby's, London, 25 April 1983, lot 69.
Thanks to the work of Peter Kidd, we now know a great deal about this manuscript, which was very luxurious and was almost certainly made for a Benedictine nun or abbess: some of the related leaves refer to a monastic community and an abbess (see Kidd, 2019, p. 109). The origin of this folio has given rise to much debate: England, Rhineland, Flanders and even eastern France. An English origin is suggested by the type of decoration on the endpapers and the illumination (see Fliegel 1999, no. 12-23, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection, Cleveland Museum of Art). The end-of-line jokes can be compared with the Salvin Hours (London, BL, Add. MS 21926 and Add. MS 48985) or the Windmill Psalter (NY, Pierpont Morgan Museum, MS M.102). For his part, Peter Kidd tends to favour a Flanders or Rhineland origin (Kidd 2019, no. 20, pp. 106-109), in particular a group of psalters linked to Lambert le Bègue in Liège (see for example Université de Liège, MS 431).
A large number of related leaves have been identified and passed through major collections and public sales, and a first (partial) list can be found in the notice published at Sotheby's, London, 7 July 2015, lot 13 and in the list compiled by Peter Kidd (see: Peter Kidd, 'A Lavishly Illuminated 13th-Century Psalter-Hours Made for a Nun (I and II)', Blog: Manuscripts Provenance, 2019; see also Peter Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, Vol. II, Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European Miniatures, London, 2019, pp. 106-109.
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