Beschreibung:

ILLUMINATED INITIAL S AND BORDER WITH FIGURES, on a leaf from a Gradual, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT CHOIRBOOK ON VELLUM
ILLUMINATED INITIAL S AND BORDER WITH FIGURES, on a leaf from a Gradual, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT CHOIRBOOK ON VELLUM [southern Germany, c.1500]530 x 58mm. Pink foliage initial with scrolling leaf terminals into the margins, the initial against a ground of burnished gold with yellow decoration in a frame moulding part red, part green, the outer margin a border made up of sprays of flowers, peas, beechnuts and cobnuts with golden disks, in the lower margin the Virgin and Child enthroned, flanked by two cherubs holding scrolls, these figures probably later 16th-century insertions; ten lines of text in black ink below ten lines of music of square notation on a four-line stave of red, rubrics in red, large calligraphic initials and two-line initials of red or blue (darkened, oxidisation to cherubs' fleshtones, ink erosion affecting one line of text). This page opens with the Introit Salve sancta parens for Mass on the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin. It was folio 45 in a Gradual. Genuflection was customary at the singing of this chant and the instructions, written vertically in red, to bend the knee and rise again cross the opening line. The vegetal border is a striking departure from the customary acanthus leaves that fill the margins of most southern German manuscripts in the decades around 1500. The initial, however, bears all the hallmarks of Augsburg illumination and it is likely that the choirbook from which it came originated in one of the manuscript shops, either monastic or lay, that flourished in that city. By the end of the 15th century the collaboration of monastic scribes and lay painters there is well documented: the knowing detail of the instruction to genuflect may indicate such a collusion in the present case. It seems possible that the figures in the lower margin are a slightly later addition.