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Master of 1346 (Maestro del 1346), Italy, Bologna, active c. 1340s
Pope Gregory IX Presiding over a Legal Case (a Monk excommunicated by a Bishop?)
149 × 168 mm
Master of 1346 (Maestro del 1346)
Pope Gregory IX Presiding over a Legal Case (a Monk excommunicated by a Bishop?)
Italy, Bologna, active c. 1340s
149 × 168 mm
$35000.00
The scene shows Pope Gregory enthroned. He is surrounded by various ecclesiastics: a bishop on his left, two cardinals on the far left and right, a kneeling cleric reading from a book before one of the cardinals in the lower right, and in the center foreground a teacher holding a book before a kneeling monk.
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Description
Although the text on the verso is badly rubbed and faded, we can make out enough to identify the manuscript as a copy of the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–1241), specifically Book III, Titulus I, De vita et honestate Clericorum (on the Life and Honesty of Clerics); parts of chapters 7–9 and 10 are decipherable on the verso. Following the composition of Gratian’s Decretals (see Cat. 9), the thirteenth century saw the publication of decretal collections from later popes. The first of these was written by Pope Gregory IX, known as the Liber extra since it was an extra volume to the Decretum. The last was the Liber sextus, commissioned by Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303). Typically, the Liber sextus opens with a frontispiece showing Gregory enthroned, as occurs in Walters Art Museum, W. 158, f. 1r.
On our cutting, the scene depicted also shows Pope Gregory enthroned. He is surrounded by various ecclesiastics: a bishop on his left, two cardinals on the far left and right, a kneeling cleric reading from a book before one of the cardinals in the lower right, and in the center foreground a teacher holding a book before a kneeling monk. The text discusses the dress and duties of the clergy, whether they can grow their hair and beard long, when they should sing and with whom, whether they can marry and under what conditions, and so forth. Could the scene illustrate more specifically chapter eight, which includes the following proscription: “if any cleric presumes to frequent the monasteries of nuns without a manifest and reasonable cause, he shall be excommunicated by the bishop”? A bishop on Gregory’s left seems to be gesturing toward a cloaked woman (a nun?) on Gregory’s right, while a teacher points to a book for a clergy member kneeling in the foreground. This interpretation is a tempting one.
We can also postulate what the full page of our presumably lost manuscript looked like. The text on the verso is in two columns, like that on the Walters sheet, and it includes complete sentences, introduced by the alternating red and blue initials characteristic of Bolognese legal manuscripts. Thus, the text occupied the center of the page and was surrounded by a gloss, just like Walters W.158. The Walters manuscript includes the Glossa ordinaria of Bertrand of Parma, but other writers also wrote glosses to the Liber sextus. Cursive marginal writing on the verso indicates a second level of glossing, perhaps by students or their teachers, as is also seen on the Walters sheet. Judging from the proportions of other manuscripts illustrated with two-column miniatures and accompanied by glosses, our volume must have been very grand, close to an elephant folio, its height about twenty-seven inches.
When the miniature was first published in 1992, it was ascribed to the “Illustratore,” but Robert Gibbs and Gaudenz Freuler now securely attribute this cutting to the Master of 1346, who trained under and collaborated with the “Illustratore.” The present miniature is quite close to a miniature signaled to me by Gibbs from a manuscript of Pope Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus (Vatican, MS lat. 1394). Serving as the frontispiece of the Liber sextus, the Vatican miniature illustrates the Pope and his Court, the Pope enthroned in the center with a group of seated cardinals and bishops on the left and right. In the foreground two canons kneel in front of the pope, one of them presenting a book to him. Not only is the composition similar, but the two miniatures share many other details such as the type of garments, their drapery and palette, the use of gold leaf, the facial types, and the architectural elements.
We are grateful to Gaudenz Freuler and Robert Gibbs for their expertise.
provenance
Les Enluminures, Paris, 1992, published Catalogue 1, no. 5;
Chicago, Collection Thomas J. Burke (d. 2024).
literature
Literature:
Les Enluminures 1992, no. 5
Related literature:
Conti 1981, esp. pp. 94–95;
de Veer Langezaal 1992;
L’Engle and Gibbs 2001;
Medica in Bollati 2004, pp. 475–78;
Nashville 2021.
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Maestro del 1346 (Master of 1346)
Italy, Bologna, active c. 1340s
Whilst referring to the visual arts in the Divine Comedy, Dante singles out manuscript illuminators in Bologna as among the greatest in Europe. In the fourteenth century, Bologna was the largest city in Italy and the fifth largest city in Europe, outranking Paris. With its famous university, considered the oldest in the western world and founded in 1088, students and faculty flocked to the city from abroad, especially for the study of canon and civil law. Among its most notable illuminators in the first half of the fourteenth century, the so called Maestro del 1346 stands out. This anonymous artist takes his name from a manuscript dated 1346 that was once, but is no longer, attributed to him: the Statuti della Società dei drappieri (the Statutes of the Drapers Guild) (Bologna, Archivio di Stato di Bologna, cod. min. 12). The name has stuck, and the dating is right. The Master of 1346 fits between the so-called workshop of the “Illustratore,” with whom he probably trained and sometimes collaborated, and the celebrated Niccolò di Giacomo da Bologna, who perhaps also trained with him in the workshop of the “Illustratore” and eventually took over his workshop. He is characterized by his assimilation of the Giottesque elements already evident in the late style of the “Illustratore” along with an accentuated tension with which he endows his figures in their settings. Most of his oeuvre is in the 1340s, but among the legal manuscripts that are now securely attributed to him there is a Digestum vetus (Roermond, Gemeentemuseum, inv. 1855), which is dated 1340 and in which he collaborates with the “Illustratore” (see the cutting from this manuscript and Los Angeles, Getty Museum, MS 13). A few others by him include Gratian’s Decretals (Vatican, MS Urb. Lat. 161) and Pope Boniface VIII’s Liber sextus decretalium (Vatican, MS lat. 1394).