Description
The large initial ‘I’ prefacing “[I]uravit dominus et non penitebit” (The Lord has sworn and will not repent) introduces the antiphon at second vespers for the Feast of the Common of the Apostles celebrated on Pentecost Sunday. Saints Peter, Andrew, and Paul appear in quatrefoil roundels in descending order in a columnar frieze, depicted with their attributes, which are respectively a key, a cross, and a sword. When this large folio first came to light in 1996, before Freuler conducted his research, Milvia Bollati attributed it to the Workshop of Pacino di Buonaguida. Now that the profiles of the group of illuminators known as the Master(s) of San Pier Maggiore are well defined, this earlier attribution makes some sense, because the historiated initial is by Hand A, who initiated the project of the Antiphonals of San Pier Maggiore. Master (or mHand) A was responsible for the first section of the Common of the Saints and his sources included Pacino, the Maestro Daddeso, as well as Sienese and Pisan models.
Freuler has defined the style of Master A of Pier Maggiore as the most complex of the four associated illuminators. In 1996, Bollati noted his Pacinesque models in a Bible (Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, ms. Triv. 2139) dated between 1335 and 1340, which offers especially close analogies with the marginal decoration. The rectilinear border decoration, which includes long-beaked birds among the drolleries, derives from Sienese illumination and was adopted by other Florentine workshops. The figures, especially Saint Andrew, can be compared to a magnificent folio of an Arbor Vitae in the same Bible (f. 485). The ornamental devices used in fresco paintings in Siena such as the murals by Francesco Trani and Simone Martini served as models for the present initial with its quatrefoil medallions housing the three saints. In this respect it most closely resembles two other folios by Master A from the Antiphonal, both initials ‘I’: the first showing Saint John Departing for the Desert with a cosmati-patterned roundel within a yellow and orange framed frieze (Milan, Private Collection), and the second showing a Martyr Saint in a columnar frieze with a cosmati-patterned roundel surrounding the martyr saint (Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, inv. 2160). The Cini leaf shares other decorative features with the present initial I such as the four-lobed ornament in the margin and the sculpturesque surround for the saint.
Master A’s assimilation of the post-Giottoesque idiom favoring concrete space in the solid world is seen in his beautiful Annunciation housed in an initial ‘M’ that depicts a fully developed spatial setting for the room in which the Virgin sits reading, interrupted by the Angel Gabriel who approaches from outside the initial, like young Saint John in the initial ‘I’. The assimilation of Sienese and Pisan decorative elements along with the response to northern Italian monumental painting, first evident in the contributions by Master A, and increasingly displayed as the project for the three-volume Antiphonal progressed, provide the artistic foundation for the development of the illuminators of the Scuola of Sainta Maria degli Angeli in Florence to such an extent that Freuler even suspects that Hand D may one day be identified as the young Gherarducci. The nuns of San Pier Maggiore, who commissioned the Antiphonals, now emerge as key players in the history of Florentine manuscript illumination.
We are grateful to Gaudenz Freuler for his expertise.
provenance
Paolo Brisigotti, London, Les Enluminures, Paris, and Longari, Milan (BEL), 1993–1996, exhibited Paris and London, 1996–1997;
Private Collection, USA, 1996–2024.
learn
Master(s) of San Pier Maggiore, Italy, Florence, c. 1346–1362
Recent research by Gaudenz Freuler has brought into focus an important, previously undefined group of Florentine illuminators working together around the middle of the fourteenth century on a single project after the pre-Giottesque illuminators in Florence such as Maestro Daddesco. They were responsible for a set of three Antiphonals that consist today of some forty-four leaves and cuttings and a fragmentary volume (65 folios) almost certainly made for the city’s most prestigious religious house for women, the Benedictine convent of San Pier Maggiore founded under the Abbess Ghisla Firidoli in 1067 and demolished in 1783. The frequency with which illustrations of Saint Peter appear in the Florentine manuscript, even when unwarranted by the text, combined with the devotion to Saint Benedict as befits a Benedictine commission, supports this assumption that the manuscript was made for this important nunnery, from which a slightly later manuscript Ordo also survives. We have thus newly christened the group of artists after their eponymous work, the Master(s) of San Pier Maggiore. The fragments come from the Common of the Saints, the Proper of Time, and the Proper of the Saints, which were dispersed at the latest by the 1930s. Freuler has singled out four artists working on the project over almost two decades. Hand A began the project in about 1346 with the assistance of Hand B, and his style harks back to Maestro Daddesco and Pacino da Buonaguida, while revealing some Pisan and Sienese sources. Following a short interval, Hand C intervened, and in c. 1360 Hand D concluded the series with miniatures that anticipate the more sophisticated work of the latter half of the fourteenth century, especially that of Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci.
publications
Published:
Bollati, Milvia. Catalogue BEL: Illuminations, Enluminures, Miniature. Paris, 1996, no. 4;
Freuler in Tartuferi, Angelo, ed. L’Eredita di Giotto: Arte a Firenze, 1340–1375. Florence, 2008, 77, 214–23;
Freuler, Gaudenz, ed. Italian Miniatures from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries, 2 vols. Milan, 2013, vol. II, 548;
Freuler in Medica, Massimo, Federica Toniolo, and Alessandro Martoni, eds. Le miniature della Fondazione Giorgio Cini: Pagine, ritagli, manoscritti. Cinisello Balsamo, 2016, no. 33a, 168–71.