Beschreibung:

Associate of the Virgil Workshop Adoration of the Magi, miniature on a leaf from a Book of Hours, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Paris, c.1400-1410] An elegant miniature from a Parisian Book of Hours painted at the beginning of the 15th century by an associate of the Virgil Workshop, whose work graced the library of the great bibliophile Jean de Berry. 177 x 128mm. The Adoration of the Magi opening sext in the Hours of the Virgin. Reverse with 14 lines of text, four illuminated initials and line fillers with a one-sided ivy-leaf border, ruled space: 98 x 63mm, 19th-century pen annotation ‘Nº 5 at bottom margin of the recto. Mounted: 323 x 265mm. Provenance: Acquired from Marc Antoine du Ry, cat. 3, Image and Likeness (2003), no 11. The miniature is in a style associable with that of the Virgil Master, the Parisian illuminator whose activity Millard Meiss traces from the 1390s into the second decade of the 15th century; he and his workshop were responsible for more than half a dozen manuscripts in the library of Jean de Berry (see M. Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries, 1974, pp. 408-411). Among the illustrations chosen by Meiss to exemplify the Virgil Workshop are miniatures from a French translation of Valerius Maximus completed for Jean de Berry in 1401 (Paris, BnF fr.282): the plates show the same simple, diapered backgrounds – an inheritance from the 14th century; the style of the Virgil Master developed less markedly than his contemporaries across his career – and male faces with the same long, thin nose and straggly beard and side-whiskers as the kneeling Magi in our miniature (e.g. cf. f.345). Around 1411, the Virgil workshop collaborated with the workshop of the Boucicaut Master on a Book of Hours (Paris, BnF Nouv. acq. lat. 3107): the Adoration of the Magi miniature, f.80 in that manuscript, is more refined, with a fully developed background and elegant figuration, but the figure of the balding Magi who kneels before the Virgin resembles ours, reversed in orientation.