Miniatures

In this lyrical illumination, the graceful angel Gabriel, in a long white robe with red decoration appears before the Virgin, dressed in blue, red, and green, who sensitively leans toward Gabriel, as she stands before a lectern, her reading interrupted, in an open Gothic aedicula. The angel gestures toward Mary, who in turn points toward herself. Almost unnoticed, a dove passes just behind the column blending into the color scheme, and from God the Father’s mouth, thin golden rays issue defining the dove’s path. The figures are set against a lapis blue background encircled by an ornamental frieze framed by double white lines and enclosing a curving line that itself encloses small white quadrilobes. The warm tones of the initial ‘A’ in mauve and soft green are set against a lavish gold ground, elaborately tooled with punchwork rosettes enclosed in a crisscross pattern and framed with further tooling and punchwork.

Everything about this manuscript fragment points to the finest work by Bonifacio Bembo. The elongated figures with small heads and high waists posed in a Gothic sway, their faces with high foreheads and small noses and pointed chins, rosy cheeks, their unusually large and dark pupils in proportion to the white of the eyes, the small lobed ears that peak out from curly blond hairdos, and tiny delicate hands. Compare, for example, the angel Gabriel both with the Knight of Coins in the Cary-Yale Visconti deck of Tarot cards and with the Queen of Swords in the Morgan deck. Not only are the figures similar, so too is the gold tooled and punched ornament; note the crisscrossed backgrounds of the Visconti-Sforza sets, containing the Visconti sun motif instead of the quadrilobed rosette, and the framed circular punchwork in the Cary-Yale Visconti. Bonifacio Bembo’s painting in Avignon (Musée du Petit Palais) includes a Virgin who compares closely in figure and facial type, as well as pose, with the Virgin in the present miniature. This female type is repeated in many other accepted attributions to Bembo such as the Lancelot drawings, where we also find Gothic aediculae set in three-quarter view.

This newly discovered Annunciation, surely by Bembo, encourages revisiting some of the previous attributions of manuscript illuminations to the illusive artist. The figure of God the father appears in the Rimini Psalter, and it also resembles representations of David in the same manuscript dated 1442. Two illuminations are even closer. Similar to the present initial in its tooled and punched gold leaf framing is a Psalter leaf illustrating Monks Singing sold in London Christie’s (13 July 2016, lot 108) Although the figures have none of the elegance of those in the present initial, the framing devices could suggest the same workshop. Still closer is a wonderful fragment on a partial historiated initial depicting the Creation of Eve (Milan, Longari, location unknown) with its graceful figures, white tracery on a blue ground, and similar tooling and punchwork. Do these come from the same commission for a manuscript, still to be reconstructed? Our initial, perhaps the best of those that have survived from the scattered miniatures attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, coupled with the ex-Longari fragment, offers a potentially fruitful path for resolving better this talented artist’s work as a manuscript illuminator.
We are grateful to Gaudenz Freuler for his expertise.