Wednesday 23 April 2008

León Cathedral MS 8...



One of the better APOD posts I mentioned recently discussed the similarities between f67r1 and pages 10v and 19v of a 10th-11th century antiphonal, which can be seen in "Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain" by Mireille Mentré. This is held in León Cathedral library as its MS 8: I found a good quality image of 10v on a 2006 post on the Dragon's Scriptorium blog by someone called Emma. León MS 8 is pretty (in fact, very pretty): but I'd need to see the rest of the manuscript to work out how good a match it is to the VMs.

There is also a nice picture of the circular design at Arcos de la Frontera on the Associacion Torrestrella blog, which dates it as no later than the fifteenth century. But I'd have to say it's not an obvious match for f67r1.

Moving from Spain to Italy, and there are also plenty of geometric circular designs in Italian churches: a nice one from the floor of St Mark's Basilica in Venice is at the bottom of this page from quilt artist Linda M. Poole.

But there is one of these which I can't find anywhere, which I think I caught a glimpse of in "Francesco's Venice" on TV: it was in the floor of the entrance of the Marciana in Venice (and so would have been made by Jacopo Sansovino). As I recall, this was almost exactly the same shape as the circular drawing in f67r1 (though without the face in the middle). But I have been unable to find a copy of it... drat! :-( [please email me if you find one!]

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