Beschreibung:

from an illuminated Choirbook, on parchment [Angevin kingdom of Naples (probably monastery of San Chiara), c. 1325] Long and thin cutting, with a large initial ‘I’ enclosing a standing full-length saint, clean shaven and with wavy hair and pale blue eyes, dressed in vivid red and blue robes, barefoot and pointing with his right hand, with a wide burnished gold halo, the figure set on a deep pink ground heightened with swirling white penwork and large gold bezants, the foot of the initial terminating in a spray of green, yellow, red and blue acanthus leaves with a sharp burnished gold tip, the initial mostly cut to edges with remains of a character or two and edges of 4-line red staves at edge, laid down on nineteenth-century paper, smudges to saint’s tunic with losses in area of hands, with slight damage to edge of saint’s face, in card mount, with modern pencil note on reverse “D. Beresford-Jones Esq, Upton Heyes, Chester”, 304 by 90mm. This large and impressive miniature is the sister cutting of one in the Wildenstein collection showing a bearded saint with an identical high and rounded forehead and on the same distinctive grounds incorporating large bezants (illustrated in Carl Nordenfalk, Bokmålningar från Medeltid och Renässans, 1979, pl.223, with smaller initials from same parent codex in pls.224-25). Both of these cuttings are perhaps fugitives from a Choirbook once in the same series as Stockholm, National Museum, B 2101 (ibid, no.20, and see in particular pl.113), that an Antiphoner of Franciscan Use which has near-identical initials, and whose contents suggest it was produced for the monastery of Santa Chiara in Naples. The style here draws on archaic southern Italian models, and blends these with the influence of French thirteenth-century art (cf. the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, now BnF, fr.2186: Stones, Gothic Manuscripts 1260-1320 I, pl.39; the Breviary of Phillippe le Bel dated 1296, BnF. lat.1023: ibid, p.175; and the late thirteenth-century Somme le roi, now British Library, Additional 54180: ibid. pl.194, for figures with similar large white heads with finely detailed hair). Nordenfalk suggested this was the result of the cultural influence of Angevin rule on the region from 1266 until the mid-fifteenth century. King Robert ‘the Wise’ of Naples and Sicily, the most prominent member of this dynasty who was crowned in 1310 and died in 1343, elevated Santa Chiara to be the central church of the region, and was buried there in a magnificent funerary monument. The delicately painted form of the saint is a fine study of the human form in the French tradition, and the depiction of the eyes of the saint and the rendering of his bare feet suggest an artist of considerable talent.