AN ILLUMINATED VELLUM MANUSCRIPT LEAF WITH A FINE HISTORI...

TEXT FROM THE OPENING OF THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD.

      Florence, ca. 1480 127 x 89 mm. (5 x 3 1/2"). Single column, 12 lines of text in a very neat uncluttered gothic book hand. Rubrics in red, four one-line initials in red or blue, recto WITH A BEAUTIFUL DENSE FULL BORDER with much foliage, many flowers, very numerous small gold bezants, and, at the middle top, a skull, as well as WITH A FINE HISTORIATED "D" painted in several colors on a burnished gold ground ENCLOSING A SKELETON (from the fourth rib upwards) against a powder blue background, the border, text, and initial within a fine modelled frame of brown and gold. The leaf carefully inlaid into a larger piece of vellum (measuring approximately 8 1/8 x 5 5/8"), the black ink of the text somewhat faded (a few letters neatly retouched); in all other ways AN EXTREMELY FINE, EXTRAORDINARILY BRIGHT LEAF, with its gilt still shimmering. This leaf comes from a manuscript executed in the style of Mariano del Buono (1433-1504), a leading Florentine illuminator during the 1470s. Three of the splendid manuscripts that he painted appear as nos. 49, 68, and 69 in the catalogue entitled "The Painted Page," done for the magnificent exhibition held in 1994-95 at the Royal Academy in London and then the Morgan Library in New York. The historiation on both leaves is first rate, and the borders are simply superb. The inlaying of leaves into vellum, as here, is characteristic of items from the library of John Boykett Jarman. $ 2900