Beschreibung:

MOSES RECEIVING THE TABLETS OF THE LAW, miniature on a leaf from a Bible in the French translation of RAOUL DE PRESLES, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Paris, mid 15th century].
MOSES RECEIVING THE TABLETS OF THE LAW, miniature on a leaf from a Bible in the French translation of RAOUL DE PRESLES, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Paris, mid 15th century]. 290 x 240mm, the miniature 135 x 155mm. A horned Moses receives from God the tablets of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments before giving the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites, the miniature and text surrounded by a full-page border, the text opening Raoul de Presle's prologue to the Book of Exodus (‘Selon ce que dit Ysidore [...]’), 38 lines of text on verso. Framed. Commissioned by Charles V of France, building on the earlier, unfinished, work of Jean de Sy, and completed in the late 1370s, Raoul de Presles’s (1316-1382) vernacular Bible was one of the two principal translations of the Bible into French that came to dominate the manuscript tradition of the fourteenth century. Its influence endured well into the fifteenth century, as exemplified here. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY RARE TEXT, INDEED WE CAN FIND NO RECORD OF A LEAF FROM DE PRESLES’S TRANSLATION SOLD AT PUBLIC AUCTION IN THE PAST FORTY YEARS. Only six manuscript codices of Raoul's fourteenth-century translation survive, all in public institutions (four at the BnF; one at Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 0076 and another at the British Library, Lansdowne 1175). The parent manuscript must have been an imposing and splendid creation, for which the original owner engaged the services of a close associate of the Master of Jean Rolin II (fl. c. 1440-1465), known for the missal produced for the cardinal-bishop of Autun (Lyon, Bib. Mun., MS. 51), if not the master himself. One of the premier Parisian illuminators of the generation following the Bedford Master, his style is most identifiable here in the modelling with gold, and the broad-featured male faces, somewhat swarthy, with hatched facial hair and double-pronged beards (see Avril & Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peintures en France 1440-1520 , 1993, pp.38-45, on the Master).