Design for the Frontispiece of a Manuscript or Book. Verso: Minor Sketch of an Ear, further small indecipherable sketch and five parallel lines drawn freehand adjacent to single words

The drawing appears to represent one of the rare instances in which an artist’s design for the frontispiece of a manuscript or printed book has survived. The fact that the decorative border is wider at right than on the left suggests that the design was intended for the right-hand side of a folio (i.e. a recto). The artist conceived of the border as a complex architectural structure, before which the blank space for the lettering seems to float, just off-center to the left, held only by two putti leaning down from above. Two large pedestals form the lowest level of the architectural structure. They support two registers of double pilasters, the interstices, which are decorated with sphinxes among foliage below and portrait roundels surmounted by putti above. At top, the architecture curves into an apse-like space, surmounted by four putti, two of which hold a blank escutcheon between them. The escutcheon is surmounted by what could well be a cardinal’s hat, suggesting that the seated ecclesiastic, to whom conceivably the manuscript or book was to be dedicated, was of that rank. The ecclesiastic is seated at a desk with an open book before him and a pincer with a candle on the wall behind his head. He is being approached by four further figures. The complete lack of religious imagery and the presence of portrait roundels suggest that the design was for a secular or humanist treatise.

Jonathan Alexander noted the similarity of the overall concept and of the figural types of this design to those of the frontispiece of a translation of Theophylact’s Commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the illumination of which is attributed to the Master of the della Rovere Missals.¹ This artist, also known as the Master of the Vatican Theophylact, is thought to have worked in Rome in the 1480s. Alexander also pointed out that some of the decorative motifs, such as the portrait roundels, however, are unusual for the Master of the della Rovere Missals and are more commonly found in the work of contemporaries who came from North Italian, especially Padua and Venice, where stronger antiquarian influences prevailed.

Footnotes:

1. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Vat.lat. 263; New York 1994-95, 101, 212.