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Gratian Fragments Master
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Gratian Fragments Master
Judicial Implications of Temporary Impotency, leaf illustrating Causa XXXIII from Gratian’s Decretals
425 × 290 mm (leaf)
c. 83 x 74 mm (miniature)
Gratian Fragments Master
Judicial Implications of Temporary Impotency, leaf illustrating Causa XXXIII from Gratian’s Decretals
425 × 290 mm (leaf)
c. 83 x 74 mm (miniature)
$100000.00
This leaf shows a cleric in alb, holding out his hands as he adjudicates between two lawyers on the right and a man and woman on the left. Below them, a man and woman lie embracing under the covers in bed. The scene illustrates Causa XXXIII, a complicated sexual case on the judicial implications of temporary impotency as a cause for remarriage. According to the text, the husband becomes impotent, so his wife takes another lover, whom she marries; the first husband then regains his virility and forces his wife to return to him, whereupon he takes a vow of chastity, to which his wife does not agree.
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This leaf shows a cleric in alb, holding out his hands as he adjudicates between two lawyers on the right and a man and woman on the left. Below them, a man and woman lie embracing under the covers in bed. The scene illustrates Causa XXXIII, a complicated sexual case on the judicial implications of temporary impotency as a cause for remarriage. According to the text, the husband becomes impotent, so his wife takes another lover, whom she marries; the first husband then regains his virility and forces his wife to return to him, whereupon he takes a vow of chastity, to which his wife does not agree. Interestingly, the wife points to the non-performing part of her husband’s body, while the husband raises his arms in apparent distress. In the historiated initial ‘Q’ below the main miniature, a hooded troubadour taps on a tambourine, reminding us that Toulouse was a center for wandering poets and musicians. The present depiction is relatively tame compared to the initial illustrating the same subject in a Decretals manuscript in Baltimore (Walters Art Museum, MS 133, f. 277r), in which the gathered lawyers examine the husband’s genitals.
 
Not long after the recovery in the late eleventh century of Justinian’s civil law code, Gratian, a teacher of law at Bologna University, around 1140, compiled the Concordia discordantium canonum (Concordance of Discordant Canons), better known simply as the Decretum Gratiani, or the Decretals. He collected nearly 4,000 extracts from diverse church sources in an attempt to make sense of a thousand years of differing regulations, composing a canon law code that became the standard aid for study and teaching. Today, some 525 manuscripts of the text are repertoried, not including the many fragments. Many are illustrated, although not always with large miniatures, sometimes with just historiated initials. Of the forty-one or forty-two miniatures that would most likely have decorated the original manuscript (Stones says forty-one and Peter Kidd forty-two), more than half of these survive. According to Kidd, the parent volume may have been disbound by Léon Gruel (1840–1923) who perhaps owned the original manuscript, although Stones speculates that it might have already been disbound in France by 1839. Leaves exist in major museum collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Princeton Art Museum, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and the Musée Marmottan in Paris, as well as in private collections like the Robert McCarthy Collection, from which the present leaf comes.
 
The style of the miniatures illustrating the twenty-two leaves is homogeneous and rich both in narrative detail and marginal enhancement. Compare the illustration for Causa XIX, on the respect due to a bishop’s right to decide when a cleric may enter the monastic life, which shows a seated bishop addressing a standing man who presents two kneeling youths, while a woman watches a monk robe and disrobe another monk (McCarthy Collection, BM 1648). As in the present leaf, a scene in the initial ‘D’ features a youth playing a musical instrument. The leaf in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Wade Fund, 1926.245) depicts an audience scene before a bishop, introducing Causa XIV of the Decretals. In the historiated initial ‘C’, a cleric holds up a book, and next to the miniature appears an unusually large drollery of a hybrid figure in the form of a jousting knight who takes aim with his sword at the miniature, an effective, if atypical variant on a manicula or pointing hand. The relatively recent appearance of several leaves gives hope for the recovery of even more of this important manuscript central to further study of Toulousian manuscript illumination.

provenance

Parent manuscript, Toulouse;

Then perhaps Pierre Soybert (d. 1454) in Saint-Papoul, France;

Cabinet M. Petit Radel, architect, Paris, in 1839;

London, Sam Fogg, 2006;

Acquired Robert McCarthy (BM 1646)

literature

Literature:

Bilotta 2008;

Stones 2014, vol. 1, p. 77, vol. 2, pp. 156, 158, 160–64, ills. 315, 321, 322, col. pl. 4;

Kidd 2021, no. 70, pp. 235–43;

Related literature:

Friedberg 1959;

L’Engle and Gibbs 2001

learn

Gratian Fragments Master

France, Toulouse, c. 1310–1320

The artist of a set of twenty-two illuminated leaves from a grand manuscript of the Decretals by Gratian with the gloss of Bartholomew of Brescia (d. 1258) was named the Gratian Fragments Master by Alison Stones. According to Stones and to Maria Alessandra Bilotta, who have studied the group of fragments in depth, this anonymous master can be confidently localized in Toulouse in the second decade of the fourteenth century. His style is characterized especially by the pointed architectural turrets with crenelated walls behind them, by the different combinations of diapered backgrounds sometimes with fabrics hanging, and by the lavish use of gold and bright primary colors, the red veering toward an orange tone. His figures are animated, often with pronounced, gesticulating hands. There is a playful spirit to his art as well, evident in the historiated initials that accompany his grand miniatures for the Causae and the marginal decorations. Two of the leaves are inscribed “Soybret” or “Soyberti,” which suggests that they might have been owned by a jurist-bishop, Pierre Soybert (d. 1454) in Saint-Papoul about forty miles southeast of Toulouse. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Toulouse was a thriving metropolis with 35,000 inhabitants, a royal stronghold, a center of trade and culture, and a university founded in 1229, which rivaled that of Bologna for the study of law. Several manuscripts have been associated with the style of the Gratian Fragments Master, if not by his hand and if not all from Toulouse. These include the magnificent Missal of La Grasse, whose patron was Auger de Cogeux (1279–1309), abbot of the most distinguished Benedictine monastery in La Grasse, closer to Narbonne than to Toulouse itself (London, British Library, Add. MS 17006); a Summa super Decretum Gratiani by Uguccione da Pisa (Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare MS CXCIV), usually localized in Avignon; and a Decretals of Clement V, now datable to c. 1320 in Toulouse (Brescia, Biblioteca Civica Queriniana, MS B.I.1).

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