Miniatures

Illustrating the Book of Revelation (ch. 19), the double-sided cutting comes from the celebrated Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse. On the recto, Saint John the Evangelist stands to the left watching a figure on horseback, known as the Divine Warrior, an image often interpreted as Christ, with orange discs around his head (“behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True…and on his head were many crowns…”). Wearing a shield, the Divine Warrior thrusts a lance through the neck of the seven-headed creature, the Beast interpreted symbolically as representing various forms of evil. On the verso, a mounted figure directs a man who spears the Beast, which he throws into a cave, while carrion birds feast on the flesh of the dead on the right (“And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse…and all the fowls were filled with their flesh”). On the recto, the defacement of the Beast, described in the Book of Revelation as “the scarlet-colored beast full of names of blasphemy,” is most probably due to a deliberate practice of owners to attack demonic and thus powerful images. In so doing, the readers, on the side of the Divine Warrior, engaged in their own battle with the Beast, the kings of the earth and their enemies. The patterned blue tiled background with red dots alternates with a similarly composed background of red tiles with blue dots on the cuttings.

 

The parent manuscript was attributed in a 1983 auction catalogue to a York Workshop active in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. However, later in the same year prompted by the acquisition of some of the cuttings by the Cleveland Museum of Art (1983.73.1 and 1983.73.2), where he was then the curator, Patrick de Winter suggested other closer comparisons, notably an Apocalypse with a French text in the Lorraine dialect. These included fragments of an Apocalypse in London (British Library, Additional MS 22493) and especially a French text in Lorraine dialect (Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Mscr. Dresd. Oc. 50). Although the style is different, the iconographical scheme is relatively comparable to the Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse. Stylistic parallels can be found in several other important manuscripts from this region, including the Breviary of Marguerite de Bar (London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 8) and the Pontifical of Renaud, her brother (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 298; Prague, Národní knihovna České republiky, MS XXIII.C.120).

 

Both were produced in Lorraine ten or twenty years after the Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse, and although the hand of the Master of the Burckhardt-Wildt Apocalypse is not the same, the artist(s) probably come from the same workshop. De Winter went further by suggesting a royal origin for the Burckhardt-Wildt manuscript, belonging either to Eleanor of England, the eldest daughter of King Edward I or, more probably, to Eleanor Plantagenet (1264–1297), who became the bride of Henry III of Bar in 1294.

 

The presence of text on both sides of the cutting (not present or legible in most of the others) is important for an understanding of the parent manuscript, proving that it was written in Latin, in two columns, with the biblical text on the left and the abridged commentary attributed to Berengaudus on the right. On the recto appears part of Revelation 19:19 and on the verso part of Revelation 19:20, both with commentary. In the original manuscript, this cutting came after the illumination now in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford (1983.39a, 1983.39b), which was folio 44, showing Christ sitting on a white horse, followed by his armies while heaven is opened (Rev. 19:11–15 and Rev. 19: 17–18) and before that of Les Enluminures, now in a private collection, which was folio 46, showing the Beast Enchained and the First Resurrection (Rev. 20:1–3 and Rev. 20: 4–5).

 

The Apocalypse leaves are renowned, in part, for their place in the early history of collecting illuminations by placing them in albums or scrapbooks of different sizes and types, like the albums or portfolios in which prints and drawings were collected from at least the sixteenth century. Originally commissioned by the Bar family in Lorraine in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the Apocalypse manuscript was probably still intact in a French monastic institution, before it was presumably dismembered right around the time of the French Revolution by Peter Birman (1758–1844) of Basel. A landscape painter and art dealer, Birman famously also owned and sold the leaves of Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Étienne Chevalier now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly. He mounted the fifty leaves cut from the original manuscript in helter-skelter order into an album, which he then sold ready-made in 1796 to Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt (1752–1819), a silk-ribbon manufacturer, also of Basel. The album remained with the latter’s descendants until it was sold in London at Sotheby’s on 25 April 1983 as part of the so-called Burckhardt-Wildt sale. Containing about 475 illuminated cuttings on 53 folios, the Birman-Burckhardt-Wildt album displayed the wonderful Apocalypse cuttings at the very front on the first six folios. The sale was enormously successful; the leaves ended up at many public institutions: the Morgan Library and Museum, the Walters Art Museum, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, the Detroit Institute of Art, and elsewhere. It is now rare for cuttings to appear on the market, because so few leaves remain in private hands (For a complete list of the miniatures, and the present location of many, see mssprovenance.blogspot.com/p/burckhardt-wildtapocalypse-miniatures.html).