Morganmobile: Telling Fragments

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This large “C” encloses a gold monstrance, the vessel for displaying a communion wafer. The distinctive image embossed on the wafer allows this fragment of illumination to be traced to a large multi-volume Gradual (the choir book containing the words and music for high Mass) commissioned in the 1520s by the canons of the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, France. The Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon, known from over a dozen miniatures and prints, bore an image of Christ as Judge enthroned among the Instruments of his Passion. In 1433 Pope Eugenius IV gave the miraculously bleeding Host to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. Philip installed it in his ducal church in Dijon, which was renamed the “Sainte-Chapelle” because it contained a relic from Christ himself: his blood. Host, monstrance, and the Sainte-Chapelle itself were subsequently destroyed in the French Revolution. The Morgan fragment is one of only three that survive from this grand and elaborately illustrated Gradual.

Sacred Bleeding Host of Dijon, from a Gradual commissioned by the canons of Dijon’s Sainte-Chapelle and illuminated by the Master of the Bruyères Hours [(Oudot Matuchet?]), France, Dijon, 1520s. MS M.1144. Purchased on the Edwin H. Herzog Fund and the Fellows Endowment Fund, 2005.