Epistulae: MS 172

Titles

Epistulae

Maker(s)

Author: Jerome
Artist: Jacopo da Fabriano

Entities

• Other

Categories

• Illuminated manuscript
• Manuscript

Description

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Parchment, i modern parchment flyleaf + 193 fols., 300 x 210 mm (192 x 128 mm), two columns, 39 lines, ruled in brown ink, quire and leaf signatures, catchwords.

BINDING: Fifteenth century, brown leather over wooden boards, with blind-tolled cable pattern, four trefoil metal mounts for clasps on lower cover, corresponding small metal bosses in groups of three on upper cover, the pastedown on the lower cover is the first leaf of a fourteenth-century copy of Rationale divinorum officiorum, modern spine repair, using early title label.

CONTENTS:
fols. 1r-2v Capitula to the Epistles of Jerome
fols. 5r-192r Jerome, selection of Epistles and related works with letters from Augustine, Damasus, Pammachius and Oceanus

DECORATION: Historiated initial [O, 10 ll.] in graded magenta on square gold ground, with full floral border framed by gold staves and containing putti, birds, a butterfly, and a series of historiated roundels: fol. 5r St Jerome at his desk accompanied by his lion, border roundels showing a youth (top left border), five roundels in outer border (from top to bottom), putti playing drum and trumpet with a bearded man (1), putti playing harp, drum and lyre (2), St Jerome penitent (3), two putti, one playing viol (4), and two putti wrestling (5), and three heraldic roundels (from left to right) supported by putti in lower border, barry of six azure and or, with three gold eight-pointed stars (1), on a gold ground, three blue mountains out of which a cross and two flowers are growing, surmounted by bishop’s mitre, partly erased (2), and barry of six azure and or, with three gold eight-pointed stars (3).

ORNAMENTATION: Gold initials [2-7 ll.] outlined in black and yellow on square grounds of blue, green, magenta and dark orange with white or yellow highlighting, for each letter.

Notes

History note: Monastery of San Benedetto in Fabriano (note in a seventeenth-century hand on fol. 1r); W.H. Crawford of Lakelands, Co. Cork; purchased for the Museum at his sale, Sotheby’s, London, 18 March 1891, lot 1558 (sale catalogue cutting inside upper cover).