Beschreibung:

PENTECOST, an historiated initial V on a leaf from an Antiphonal with its facing leaf, LLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM
PENTECOST, an historiated initial V on a leaf from an Antiphonal with its facing leaf, LLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM [Toledo, c.1500]820 x 590mm approx. The office for Pentecost is marked at Vespers on the vigil by the initial V with purple foliate staves on a mauve ground, showing the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin, Apostles and Holy Women; the hymn Veni creator spiritus is written in black ink in a gothic bookhand below four five-lined staves ruled in red with neumes of a square notation; rubrics are in red. The first verse continues on the facing recto below two staves, followed by the remaining verses which conclude on the verso. Each page of the double opening is surrounded by a full border of acanthus with large gold disks in gold-framed compartments. Each verse of the hymn is marked by a large initial with foliate staves on a contrasting coloured ground, three on both recto and verso. A very large initial opens the antiphon below one stave of music at the foot of the verso. Five staves are on the recto of the Pentecost initial (worn, margins cropped and edges eroded or roughly cut, borders rubbed, tears into border and text on lower edge of recto of opening). In the borders of both pages of the verso-recto opening are shields bearing the Five Wounds of Christ beneath a crown and against rays and, in the lower margin on the recto, resting on a crescent moon, attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman idenfiied with the Virgin. The drawing visible on one shield does not correspond with the painted charge. The Five Wounds were favoured emblems of rosary confraternities since they equate with the five 'Our Fathers' that interspersed the five decades of 'Hail Marys'. These leaves come from the same set of antiphonal volumes as those in the following two lots: the facing leaves with the Ascension (lot 21) probably opened the volume from the Temporal set from which these leaves come. The volumes were probably commissioned for a rosary confraternity and show interesting parallels with the leaves cut from a set of huge Graduals made for the Rosary Confraternity at the Dominican convent of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo. This confraternity showed the wounds of Christ on a veil or shroud above the motto MISERERE MEI so that they were not the commissioners of the present lot, although similar decoration and layout can be seen in a Kyriale from San Pedro Mártir, now Yale University, Beinecke Library, ms 710, see L. Candelaris, 'Tropes for the Ordinary in a 16th-century choirbook from Toledo', Early Music , XXXIV, 2006, pp.587-612. The decoration suggests that the volumes from which lots 19-21 were cut were made in Toledo c.1500 for another rosary confraternity anxious to compete with San Pedro Mártir in the splendour with which it celebrated the divine office. The inclusion of women in the Pentecost initial may reflect the membership of the confraternity. The borders show the acanthus leaf decoration, usual in the second half of the fifteenth century, moving towards the compartmentalised, more classicising symmetrical motifs seen in a fully developed form in the seven-volume Rich Missal of Cardinal Cisneros, illuminated in Toledo between 1503 and 1518 (J. Dominguez Bordona, Spanish Illumination II , 1930, no 149). (2)