Beschreibung:

CRUCIFIXION, Canon miniature from a Missal, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM [northern Netherlands, ?Utrecht, 3rd quarter 15th century] 293 x 190mm. The arch-topped miniature contains a populous scene of the Crucifixion full of narrative detail. In a barren, rocky landscape with a distant prospect of Jerusalem and the sun and moon in the sky, Christ hangs on the Cross between the two thieves. On the left Longinus on horseback lances Christ's side, watched by three richly dressed riders on the right; the Magdalene grasps the base of the Cross. In the left foreground the Virgin, John the Evangelist and the third Mary kneel and lament, while a group of two executioners and a soldier blowing a horn are on the right. The miniature is framed on three sides with a gold bar border with alternating pansies and daisies, and a full-page border made up of curling blue and gold acanthus, sprays of flowers and hairline tendrils with burnished gold trefoils and disks. In the left border a youthful saint or angel holds a coat of arms, azure three roses or , and below him in the corner St Margaret, emerging from the dragon, presents a kneeling cleric who looks up towards the miniature (rubbed, retouched and laid down). Framed and glazed. This large and unusual Canon illustration resembles the detached Crucifixion by the Masters of Otto van Moerdrecht in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Inv. No. 59.254) that has been described as "one of the most ambitious such illustrations from the Northern Netherlands to have survived". It not only shares with the Cleveland miniature an open landscape setting and a numerous cast of characters, but two of these figures seem to have a common source. The group of riders approaching the Cross in the Cleveland Crucifixion was copied from a lost painting, believed to have been by Jan van Eyck that is known through a copy in the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest. Two of the horseback dignitaries on the right of the present miniature clearly echo this group. The same figures also appear, reversed, in the background of the Nativity in a Book of Hours in Cleveland (Coll. Otto Ege) that is close in style and page layout to this Crucifixion. The Cleveland manuscript has been identified as a possible early work of the Master of Gijsbrecht van Brederode, and the present leaf seems likely to be by the same illuminator. Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting , New York, 1990, pp.83 & 222-3, pls 23 & 66.