Beschreibung:

ST STEPHEN and THE ASCENSION with its facing leaf, two historiated initials on leaves from two antiphonals ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM
ST STEPHEN and THE ASCENSION with its facing leaf, two historiated initials on leaves from two antiphonals ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM [Toledo, c.1500]870 x 590mm. St Stephen kneels in a landscape, praying to God above, the stones of his martyrdom gathered in his dalmatic in an initial L with pink and white foliate staves opening into a face on a blue and white ground. It opened the antiphon to his office, Lapidaverunt , on the verso of folio 48 from an enormous antiphonal covering the winter feasts. A border of naturalistic flowers on stylised stems of fictive gold extends into upper and side margins on a divided ground of red and blue; on recto and verso five lines written in black ink in a gothic bookhand below five-lined staves ruled in red, rubrics in red. From its layout and decoration it clearly belongs with the same Antiphonal set as the leaf with St John in lot 20 and probably comes from the same church as the following item (paint losses to initial, including saint's face, repairs to lower margin). with 820 x 570mm. The Ascension where Christ disappears upwards leaving footprints that look like His actual feet, watched by the Virgin, the Apostles and several women, within the framing for a letter I with brown and yellow staves partly formed from two figures, the lower doing a headstand, cut with a section of text and border from the opening leaf of a volume from a Temporal Antiphonal. The hymn Jesu nostri redemptori continues on the rest of the leaf and onto the facing recto, written in black ink in a gothic bookhand with five-lined staves ruled in red, rubrics in red; both pages surrounded by full borders of acanthus entwined round burnished gold bars straddled or climbed by pairs of putti and interspersed with burnished gold disks; the text leaf with three large initials and its verso with one very large and one large initial with coloured foliate staves on contrasting grounds; the opening recto ruled and blank formerly a pastedown (Ascension leaf: wormed into text and border, edges eroded, entire leaf worn, creased, cropped into margins, the section with the Ascension completely excised; text leaf: worn, edges eroded). In layout and decoration this leaf matches the opening with Pentecost (lot 19) and apparently began that volume of the Temporal from an Antiphonal set made probably for a rosary confraternity in Toledo. The inclusion of so many women at the Ascension, matching their presence at Pentecost, may reflect the membership of the confraternity. The border decoration of these leaves with the playful putti is more typical of 15th-century illumination in Toledo and supports a date of c.1500 when these traditional forms were just beginning to give way to more strictly classical decoration. It was not unusual for an illuminated leaf to be used directly as the pastedown. The Kyriale for the Rosary Confraternity at the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo starts with similar abruptness with a richly decorated opening (Yale University, Beinecke Library, ms 710, see under lot 19). The Confraternity that owned the volumes for which the leaves in lots 19-21 were created was clearly a wealthy and important group, capable of financing such a huge and impressive undertaking. (3)