Description
The manuscript painting depicts a formidable and expressive Saint Peter in an initial ‘O’ beginning with the chant “O Roman felix” (O happy Rome), which is a hymn for the Office of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29). Portrayed half-length and wearing the papal tiara, Peter gazes in the distance as he turns in three-quarter view to the right, while he holds a pair of glittering keys in his right hand and a blue-bound manuscript in his left hand. The brilliant orange of his robe is emphasized using the same orange shade of the initial, whose contours are executed in pale pink, yellow, green, and blue.
Acquired by the Scottish antiquary James Dennistoun in Florence in 1837, this initial was included in an album of manuscript leaves and cuttings that Dennistoun composed during his Italian voyages to constitute a sort of history of art through illumination. It was Dennistoun himself who recorded that this and the related initials come from a Choir Book from the Cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore; they belonged “to a book in the choir from the Cathedral of Florence; they are of the same age as it, but the style imitates rather that of the Gaddis, the best pupils of Giotto who somewhat enlarged his manner.” Dennistoun’s collection, which went by succession to one of his relatives, was later acquired by the renowned art historian Lord Kenneth Clark of Saltwood, who placed the cuttings in another set of albums and after whose death in 1984 it was dispersed (London, Sotheby’s, June 27, 1984, lot 78, ill.).
The cutting is from the same Choir Book as seven other initials formerly in Dennistoun’s, then Clark’s collections, including the Annunciation (Fig. 1), the Birth of the Virgin, Saint Peter (in a ‘D’) now in the collection of T. Robert and Katherine States Burke, Saint Paul, a Virgin Martyr, and a decorated initial ‘S’. These were first attributed in 1986 by Tartuferi to Maestro Daddesco. Our cutting is remarkably close to its slightly larger sister fragment of Saint Peter (in an ‘O’). Not only do they share the same pose and treatment of the aging pope-saint with a full beard, eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and wrinkles around the eyes and forehead, they also display the same technique. The illuminator applied a blue-grey, wash-like layer on top of which are painted reds, browns, and whites for the complexion. In addition to gold leaf, Maestro Daddesco used chemically synthesized gold pigment aurum musicum, known as mosaic gold, which can be seen in the keys held by Saint Peter and in his rectangular collar, pallium, and papal tiara, as an analysis reported by Keene uncovered.
Keene has noted the similarities of this set of initials to two related Choir Books, an Antiphonal and a Gradual, from the Cathedral in Florence (Archivio storico dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, L.2. n.2 and M.2.n. 1), both alas damaged in the flood of 1966, as well as a sumptuous Missal from the Cathedral (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Edili 107). The latter includes a reference to the bodily relics of Saint Zenobius only exhumed in 1331 and an image of the Cathedral without its bell tower, added in 1334. This allows us to date the set of related initials to the closely circumscribed dates of 1331–1334.
provenance
Edinburgh, Scotland, James Dennistoun (1803–1844);
Auckland Castle, County Durham, England, Isabella Caroline Hensley-Henson (1869–1949);
Saltwood Castle, Kent, England, Lord Kenneth McKenzie Clark (1903–1983), his sale, London, Sotheby’s, July 27, 1984, lot 78, ill.;
Rauris Austria, Zeileis Collection;
Private Collection, Switzerland.
literature
Published:
Tartuferi, Angelo. “Corpus of Florentine Painting: Nouveautés sur le Trecento.” In Revue de l’Art 71 (1986): 43–46, nos. 12 and 13, 45–46
Tartuferi, Angelo. “I Fatti dei Romani e la miniatura fiorentina del primo Trecento.” In Paragone 441 (1986): 3–21, no. 441, 18, no. 39;
Keene in Hindman Sandra, and Federica Toniolo, eds. The Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Painting. London, 2021., 120;
Related Literature:
Hindman, Sandra, Michael Camille, Nina Rowe, and Rowan Watson. Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction. Evanston, 2001. , 80-81, 87;
Kanter in Bollati, Milvia, ed. Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani: Secoli IX–XVI. Milan, 2004, 445–46;
Sciacca, Christine, ed. Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350. Los Angeles, 2012.
learn
Maestro Daddesco, Italy, Florence, active 1315–1330s
The exact identity of the Maestro Daddesco remains unknown despite the artist’s commissions for the illumination of a large number of significant Choir Books for important foundations mostly in or near Florence, including the Cathedral, the Abbey of Saints Salvatore and Laurence in Badia a Settimo, a Dominican female house (later Sant Maria Novella), the Church of Santo Stefano al Ponte in Florence, and others. Originally named the Maestro Daddesco by Mario Salmi for his stylistic association with panel paintings by Bernardo Daddi (active c. 1312–1348), he was subsequently renamed the Maestro Pre-Daddesco, when it was realized that manuscripts attributed to the illuminator pre-dated the earliest paintings by Bernardo Daddi. The notname Maestro Daddesco is, however, retained today to refer to a large body of work produced over about two decades that includes not only illuminated manuscripts but, according to Miklós Boskovits, a few panel paintings. At least sixteen Choir Books can be associated with the artist. The earliest of these made for the Cistercians at the Badia a Settimo located in the town of Scandicci in the Province of Florence seems to be the artist’s earliest known work in c. 1315, because it includes a colophon indicating the text was completed then (and the illuminations were probably begun only shortly thereafter); and the latest are the manuscripts for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS it. 543) completed in the 1330s, probably no later than 1334. He and his workshop frequently collaborated with other artists, including the Maestro del Laudario, the Master of the Codex of Saint George, and the so-called Pacinesque illuminators. The largest group of cuttings by the Maestro Daddesco comes to us from the collection of Lord Kenneth Clark (d. 1983) and preceding him from the Scottish antiquary James Dennistoun (d. 1855). It is worth noting, as Bryan Keene has signaled, that not all the surviving cuttings can be definitively associated with surviving parent manuscripts (for a list of cuttings that lack a firm original context see Keene 2021, 119, no. 10). Laurence B. Kanter called the Maestro Daddesco “the most significant miniaturist in Florence in the second quarter of the fourteenth century.”