Miniatures

This previously unpublished cutting comes from Cristoforo Cortese’s first major commission, a Psalter or Choir Book made for the nuns of the Corpus Domini, a Venetian Dominican convent newly founded in 1395. The manuscript was sponsored by Beata Chiara Gambacorta of the parent house in Pisa, who is most likely portrayed kneeling at David’s feet in the large opening miniature of Christ Enthroned and David Playing the Psaltery. Gaudenz Freuler supposes that other members of the community—the rich patrons Marco Paruta and Facio Tommasini, their novice daughters Elisabetta and Andriola, the foundress and the first prioress Lucia Tiepolo, and her secular companions—be identified with those that appear in another manuscript illumination probably from the same manuscript, displaying the exceptional personalization that characterized this commission. Surely the burial of the Dominican nun in the present illumination represents a specific member of the order, but without further evidence we cannot know her identity. In the aperture of the initial ‘S’ a white-cloaked monk places a Dominican nun in a coffin. The sharp black outline of the faces and drapery, the goldleaf background, and the ornamental details of the initial place the illumination securely in the group. Compare, for example, the whimsical dragon-like ornament of the initial with the initial in Philadelphia of the Vestiture of a Princess-Saint, perhaps Saint Agnes (The Free Library, Lewis E.M. 25:27).

We know a great deal about the specifics of the commission. The Florentine preaching friar Giovanni Dominici ordered that books for worship and the liturgy be created for the convent, and work was begun on June 18, 1400 and nearly finished by December 1401, according to a series of letters between Dominici and the nuns. He counsels the nuns to take their liturgical manuscripts to the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele of Murano for the completion of their decorative work, paying attention to the Graduals there with large miniature paintings that could serve as models. Indeed, the nuns appear to have followed his instructions for the opening miniature follows the opening page of a Psalter illuminated by Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci in 1368 in Florence and subsequently shipped to Venice to San Michele in Murano (Venice, Museo Correr, MS Cl. V. 129). Cortese remained in contact with the monasteries of Murano, completing for the community of San Mattia on Murano a Register of Processions in 1403 (Venice, Library of the Patriarchal Seminary, Busta 956, 17) and even in 1420 working for the Camoldolese monks on Murano, influenced by the Master of the Murano Gradual.

Nineteen related cuttings come from a multivolume Antiphonal, many of them portraying Dominican nuns (listed in Hindman and Toniolo 2021, 370). Since documents specify several books for worship, we cannot be sure that all the extant cuttings, as well as the Christ-David fragment come from the same set of manuscripts. Toniolo rightly questions whether the grand Christ-David illumination could come from an Antiphonal instead of a Psalter and cautions that a further examination of the reverse of all the miniatures, the texts and the heights of the staves, is needed to resolve their origins. The discovery of the present cutting brings us one step closer to resolving the circumstances surrounding the pivotal work in the early career of Cristoforo Cortese.

We are grateful to Federica Toniolo for her expertise.