Master of the Ghent Privileges (active middle third 15th century)

Master of the Ghent Privileges (active middle third 15th century)

Sts Francis and Bernardino, miniature on a leaf from a Book of Hours, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Ghent or Tournai, mid- to late 1450s].

A delightful miniature by the Master of the Ghent Privileges, one of the leading Flemish illuminators of the second third of the fifteenth century.



171 x 113mm. On the left, St Francis kneeling and receiving the stigmata; on the right, a standing Bernardino of Siena holding the IHS monogram with rays emanating from it, behind him three mitres representing the three bishoprics he rejected, the landscape background continuous from one scene to the other, all within a full border and opening a suffrage to the two saints in a Book of Hours; verso with 16 lines of text continuing the suffrage to St Francis and St Bernardino within a 3-sided border, written space: 90 x 59mm (a little marginal staining and cropping, else in excellent condition).



Provenance:

(1) The illuminator is the Master of the Ghent Privileges, active in Ghent and Tournai in the second third of the 15th century. Bernardino of Siena was canonised in 1450, providing a terminus post quem. In the lower margin is a coat of arms lion rampant or with nowed tails, a bendlet argent, previously identified as belonging to the van Wytveliets of Brabant, although the nowed tails make such an attribution problematic.

(2) The Marquess of Bute: loosely inserted in his MS. 96, a late 15th-century northern Netherlandish Book of Hours sold at Sotheby’s, 13 June 1983, lot 22, removed and sold as lot 27 in the same sale, bought by Dr Eichenberger.



Illumination:

The Master was first identified in 1915 by Friedrich Winkler, and named after a richly illuminated copy of the Statutes and Privileges of Ghent and Flanders made for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod.2583). His style is characterised by dense, spatially ambitious compositions and fanciful landscapes, tubular draperies and rounded, jolly faces. Through a study of the borders of the three leaves – which included the present lot – offered at Sotheby’s in 1983, Gregory Clark established the likely collaboration between the Master of the Ghent Privileges and the Mansel Master, and pointed to the repetition of certain compositional tropes in the Master’s oeuvre (the marginal archer emerging from the foliage and the escutcheon-bearing lion, for example, can also be found in Walters MS. W.719). See G. Clark, Made in Flanders: the Master of the Ghent Privileges, 2000, pp.107-8.