Scenes of the Life of Saint Onuphrius
Two fragments of a miniature from the Laudario of Sant’Agnese
- Master of the Dominican Effigies
Tempera and gold on vellum
Italy, Florence, c. 1340
Two miniatures: 146 x 70 mm; 144 x 68 mm
CHF 80'000.- (exkl. VAT)
These previously unpublished fragments are significant on several respects constituting an important addition to the corpus of the Master of the Dominican Effigies, one of the leading Florentine illuminators of the second quarter of the fourteenth century.
The Master of the Dominican Effigies was a close collaborator of Pacino di Bonaguida, with whom he participated in some of the most ambitious manuscript commissions of the period, including the first illustrated copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy. They also preserve a rare narrative cycle from the life of Saint Onuphrius, whose iconography enjoyed particular popularity in mendicant circles but survives only exceptionally in Florentine manuscript illumination.
Finally, the convergence of stylistic, codicological, palaeographical, textual, musical, and liturgical evidence strongly suggests that the fragments originally formed part of the celebrated Laudario di Sant’Agnese , allowing them to be reintegrated into the reconstruction of one of the most magnificent and extensively dispersed illuminated manuscripts produced in Trecento Florence.