Miniatures

This large historiated initial ‘D’ with the Annunciation comes from a Choir Book and likely introduced the feast of the Annunciation (March 25). In this well-orchestrated composition, the Virgin’s quiet devotion, as she kneels at her prie-dieu absorbed in her prayer book, is interrupted by a luminous ray and the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The angel Gabriel bursts into the scene with striking energy. His dynamic gestures, emphasized by the flowing drapery of his garments and his blonde hair, seems to break Mary’s tranquil concentration. Behind her, a sturdy architectural backdrop mirrors her inner serenity, while a delicate blue light filters through the loggia and portico, illuminating the room. Outside, the outlines of the city’s buildings can be seen in the distance. The skillful perspective, along with the delicate interplay of light, guides the viewer’s gaze to the central symbolic elements: a lily and a majestic peacock. The fragment, deprived of the text that accompanied it, preserves the initial letter ‘D’ set against a gold background. The purple body of the letter is adorned with a pearl motif and abundant green and pink vegetal elements.

This previously unpublished cutting is related to two leaves now at the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museum in Berlin, representing The Calling of Saint Peter (initial ‘D’, min. 6219) and Saint Benedict Enthroned (initial ‘G’, min 6220). The resemblance can be observed in various elements. Among these are the checkered floor patterns and the dolphin heads (min. 6220), usually in the initial decoration, but here inserted on the prie-dieu. The Calling of Saint Peter in particular features almost the same dimensions for the gold background and an identical left border, alternating bands of gold and blue, highlighted by a delicate white line inset. The stamp at the bottom of this last-mentioned folio has allowed critics to trace its origin back to Polirone Abbey, linked to the renowned historical figure of Matilda of Canossa. If we accept the hypothesis proposed here of a connection between our Annunciation and the two Berlin folios, we can say they may have originated from the same Gradual, first identified as ‘E’ by Laura Gnaccolini (1996), or from a related Antiphonal also created for the Abbey of Polirone. Jacopo Mazzeo (in Roncroffi 2011) has retraced the historical trajectory of the various Polirone Choir Books, including the so-called Gradual ‘E’ which was likely sold in 1874 to the Roman antique dealer Alessandro Castellani (1823–1883), son of the famous goldsmith Fortunato Pio Castellani.

From a stylistic perspective, Beatrice Alai has rightly identified a similarity between the Berlin folios and the work of the painters Vincenzo Foppa and Ambrogio Bergognone. This connection also appears clear in our Annunciation cutting, which can be compared to the Annunciation scene in the predella panel of the Grazie Polyptych (1500–1510) by Vincenzo Foppa, now in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan (2094). Since 1996, Laura Gnaccolini has linked the Berlin leaves to the group on nineteen initials from the Rodolphe Kann Collection (1845–1905), previously examined by William Suida (1947). Suida dated these nineteen initials to the 1490s, attributing them to a single Lombard master active in the Brescia region and closely connected to the artist of the Arcimboldi Missal (Biblioteca del Capitolo del Duomo, Milan, MS II-D-1-13). Milvia Bollati, in her more recent analysis of the group, highlights the heterogeneous characteristics among some cuttings from the Kann Collection. According to her, several of these pieces should be attributed to the Veronese milieu, and more specifically to the workshop of Francesco and Girolamo dai Libri. However, Bollati maintains that a substantial part of these initials (including the initial ‘D’ with Saint John the Baptist, Collection of T. Robert and Katherine States Burke)should be dated c.1500 and attributed to the same artist who painted the Berlin leaves, at a slightly later stage. She defines him as a “talented Lombard master, whose complex artistic formation we have begun to disentangle more fully and whose activity we can now reconstruct between Polirone near Mantua and Brescia, where he undertook civic and monastic commissions.” There are still obvious stylistic comparisons between the present Annunciation and the Saint John the Baptist from the Burke collection: the decoration of the letter, the palette with pastel colors, the chiaroscuro of the drapery, and the blue-grey landscape all suggest that our Annunciation could enrich the corpus of works attributed to this anonymous Lombard artist, who was thoroughly attuned to the innovations of the Milanese Renaissance in the first decade of the sixteenth century.

Gaia Grizzi