Lot pagina - Van De Wiele Auctions

[BIFOLIUM FROM A CISTERCIAN BREVIARY]

Two leaves from a Cistercian Breviary, with a squawking bird, a human-headed drollery and two king's heads, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum

[France (Picardy, perhaps Amiens)
c. 1290]

€700 - €900

Two conjoined leaves, text in double columns of 25 lines of two sizes of a good gothic bookhand, capitals in ornamental penstrokes and touched in red, red rubrics, 2-line initials in blue or pink enclosing coloured foliage on gold grounds, two initials with tiny crowned king's heads, a bird with its wings flapping and beak open in the margin and a human-headed bird-bodied drollery creature in the same place, a few spots and stains, else excellent condition, each leaf: 160 by 104mm

Other leaves from this wonderful and glittering little book have appeared in Maggs, Bulletin, 20, nos. 42-43, cat. 1262 (1998), no. 13; Sotheby's, 19 June 2001, lot 10, 6 December in the same year, lot 2, 5 July 2005, lot 90 (the substantial remnant of 128 leaves), 6 December 2005, lot 10, 29 June 2007, lot 4, among numerous others. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inscriptions in the parent volume suggest that it was once in Vouray, east of Tours in the Loire valley

Manuscripts