Leaf from a fifteenth-century German Missal, with a modern drawing of Christ in a twelfth-century style added, manuscript on parchment [Germany, fifteenth century and nineteenth or twentieth century]

Single large leaf, recto with 15 lines of text in a rounded late gothic bookhand (this indexing supplementary collects for special feasts and during Lent, to be found between fols. 116 and 147 of the parent volume), in red and black ink, capitals touched in red; verso with a full-page line drawing of Christ in angular red and black robes and with yellow wash halo, holding an open book with a cut away lower corner, and the inscription Ego sum alpha et O[mega] principium et finis (Apocalypse 1.8) and Ego sum via veritas et vita (John 14:6) on its facing pages, all within a frame of two sets of double red boundary lines, script in book smudged, traces of paper at edges of recto from an old mount, darkening at edges showing that this leaf unlikely to have been cut down, scuffs, a few wormholes and small spots, else good condition, 355 by 240mm.

Provenance:
Acquired in 2008 by Roger Martin (1939-2020) of Grimsby, from an antique dealer in Weissenburg in Bavaria. The presence of paper stubs on one side of the recto suggests that the leaf was framed with the Christ outwards for some time.

Text and illustration:
This leaf contains either a remarkable forgery or a more innocent modern embellishment of a late medieval leaf by a skilled collector who wished to own a type of early drawing almost unobtainable in the market. While the text on the recto is genuine, the image of Christ on the verso has some troubling features. The script on the book does not convince as twelfth century, and the cut or nibbled away edges of one lower outer corner of the book (which apparently also cuts away the binding in the same place) are decidedly unmedieval. Moreover, the leaf is one of a pair, with the other showing the Evangelist Matthew in the act of writing in a book with similar script (again smudged), with a halo in the same identical shade of greenish yellow, in robes with similar aspects to their drapery and within identical boundary lines, that came to light in the sale of an Old Master drawings collection in Switzerland in 2012. The Swiss leaf is described as having slightly smaller dimensions (330 by 200mm.) but was framed, obscuring much of the outer borders. Crucially, both this and the Swiss leaf show features at their edges indicating that both were once facing the boards of a single bound volume (with ridges from the thongs where the book was sewn to the boards on this leaf, and both with wormholes and patterns of wear to thin diagonal gaps left at each outer corner by the spaces left between the leather that was folded over the boards - the Swiss leaf even having a dark stain at its base from those leather fold arounds). The fifteenth-century text shows that this was a Missal, and while we might find a Christ miniature at the front of a Missal, a full-page Matthew writing would be strange in this context, and bizarre if that were the last leaf of the book. Most probably these two leaves were once endleaves to a Missal, blank on their innermost sides, and were recovered from there and used to produce drawings more at home in a twelfth-century Gospel Book.