A finely illuminated initial from the Office of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins from the Rhineland, with an unusual scene of her martyrdom.
 
c. 120 × 125 mm, cutting preserving ONE HISTORIATED INITIAL ‘D’ with the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, showing the crowned virgin saint kneeling in prayer within a boat as an executioner raises his sword to behead her, set against a red ground decorated with delicate foliate scrollwork. The body of the initial painted in red and blue with reserved ornament, including hybrid figures of a standing woman and a bishop, all within a rectangular blue field decorated with fine penwork foliage, the reverse preserving parts of three lines of text and music on four-line red staves, written in Gothic textualis bookhand with square notation, with a large red initial and smaller blue initial; inscribed in twentieth-century(?) pencil “T137” by a Continental hand, with price-code(?) “eff…”(?) or “e/-/-”(?) and red pencil number “203.” Minor pigment losses and rubbing, with slight surface wear and staining, otherwise preserving exceptionally fresh colors and detail.
 
This unique historiated initial depicts the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, showing the crowned virgin saint kneeling in prayer aboard her ship as an executioner prepares to strike the fatal blow. The scene illustrates the climactic moment of Ursula’s legend, when she and her companions, the Eleven Thousand Virgins, were martyred at Cologne after returning from their pilgrimage to Rome. While the feast of Saint Ursula was celebrated widely throughout medieval Europe, the unusually elaborate narrative treatment of the saint, emphasizing both her voyage and martyrdom, recalls the particular devotion shown to Ursula in Cologne and the Rhineland, where her relics and cult occupied a central place in civic and religious identity. The lively marginal figures incorporated into the body of the initial, including hybrid creatures and ecclesiastical figures, further reflect the imaginative decorative vocabulary of Rhineland illumination around 1400.
 
The text is most likely a portion of the Office of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, possibly the Matins responsories/antiphons.
 
Provenance
(1) Sold anonymously at Sotheby’s, 5 December 2000, lot 25.
 
(2) Robert McCarthy, London, MS BM 1306.
 
Parent manuscript and sister leaves
No other cuttings from the same manuscript have yet been recognized, but the dealer's numbers on the back (“T137” and 203) suggest that it was once in a collection of significant size.
 
LITERATURE
Published: Sotheby’s, London, Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, 5 December 2000, lot 35; Peter Kidd, The McCarthy Collection, Vol. 2, Spanish, English, Flemish, and Central European Miniatures, London, 2019, p. 238, no. 63.
 
We are grateful to Peter Kidd for permission to quote from his catalogue for this entry, and we thank Senior Consultant Sandra Hindman and Peter Bovenmyer for their assistance in preparing this sale.
 
The Robert McCarthy Collection.