Medieval & Renaissance Miniature Painting. [ Bruce Ferrini, exhibition catalogue, 1995. ].

Laminated illustrated wrappers, 4to, 28 cm, 147 pp, colour ills. 43 items. From the Foreword: "This catalogue, and the exhibition it accompanies, grew out of two interrelated concerns; a conviction of the aesthetic value of illuminations as independent works of art in their own right and a conviction in the scholarly necessity of studying illuminated leaves and cuttings as membra disjecta from books. For this reason, the body of the catalogue is composed of two independant [sic] sections, presenting complementary descriptions of each of the forty-three items. Section 1 focuses on the artistic content (the style and iconography) and the historical context of items. Entries in Section I adapt a standard format used for catalogues of drawings, including at the beginning basic information on physical description, provenance, and literature. Entries in Section I thus treat the items as they were considered when they were collected, that is, as miniature paintings by (usually) identifiable artists. In this section, I have therefore deliberately refrained from discussing the items as fragments from books. Section II focuses on the codicological descriptions of items. Entries in Section II adapt a standard format of scholarly cataloguing that has gradually evolved for leaves and cuttings, in which they are treated as fragments from books, with all the implications resulting from this method. Full physical descriptions of the production, the script, and the illumination are provided. Actual rectos and versos are identified. The identifies and locations of sister leaves, that is, leaves that derive from the same original manuscript, are given. And the identity of the parent manuscript, when known, is provided. The scholar, working from information found in Section II, should easily be able to access either related leaves from the same manuscript or related manuscripts belonging to the same group. A working bibliography of basic references is supplied. The Introduction offers a brief sketch on collectors and collecting, focusing on the public sale in Paris of the collection of Frédéric Spitzer. Occuring in the 1890s, the Spitzer sale is a kind of watershed. Many old collections, most of which are now dispersed, predate it; and "new" collections - those of George Salting in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, of Pierpont Morgan in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, of John Frederick Lewis in the Free Library in Philadelphia - were formed right after it. The treatment of miniatures as independent paintings in the Spitzer sale departs significantly from earlier Victorian attitudes toward illuminations as curiosities and forms the basis of the aesthetic attitude toward miniature painting presented here." Catalogue of an exhibition held at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, Nov.-Dec. 1988 and at Maruzen Co. Ltd., Tokyo and Nagoya, Feb.-Mar. 1989. Near Very Good.…