Salve Sancta Facies (Salvator Mundi) ~ Bruges ca. 1500
Miniature on a page from a Book of Hours, 98 x 76mm, delicately showing Christ as Savior in an architectural frame with peacocks and flowerpots. It opens the prayer to the Holy Face, instituted by Innocent III as a means of gaining remission of sins without the required pilgrimage to Rome. The finest Flemish artists reveled in the tiniest details of God's creation, seen here in the brooch, the globe, the hair, the angels, the brocade, and the fingers. Christopher de Hamel notes in "Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts" that the Holy Face was characteristically a Flemish/German concept and was often the first miniature in a Book of Hours. He sees a relation with Northern pre-Reformation thinking in which the direct interaction between the Savior and the reader dispenses with the Church as intercessor. We are not here observing a Biblical scene but rather having a direct visual dialogue with God. Dr. de Hamel attributes this portrait to the artists of Vat. Lat. 10293 and B.R. IV.237, attributed by Bodo Brinkmann to the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary, possibly based on a lost painting by Van Eyck. Characteristic of this artist's work, the frame has been made to look like a domestic shelf, enhancing the illusion of a painted shrine. Bought from John Windle Rare Books, 9/12/2016. Previously in Maggs Catalog 1319 (2001), number 58. A miniature of the same dimensions and details was described as f.14 in the Horae owned by Crawford of Lakelands, dismembered and sold at Christie's, 6/26/1991.
Salve Sancta Facies (Salvator Mundi) ~ Bruges ca. 1500
Miniature on a page from a Book of Hours, 98 x 76mm, delicately showing Christ as Savior in an architectural frame with peacocks and flowerpots. It opens the prayer to the Holy Face, instituted by Innocent III as a means of gaining remission of sins without the required pilgrimage to Rome. The finest Flemish artists reveled in the tiniest details of God's creation, seen here in the brooch, the globe, the hair, the angels, the brocade, and the fingers. Christopher de Hamel notes in "Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts" that the Holy Face was characteristically a Flemish/German concept and was often the first miniature in a Book of Hours. He sees a relation with Northern pre-Reformation thinking in which the direct interaction between the Savior and the reader dispenses with the Church as intercessor. We are not here observing a Biblical scene but rather having a direct visual dialogue with God. Dr. de Hamel attributes this portrait to the artists of Vat. Lat. 10293 and B.R. IV.237, attributed by Bodo Brinkmann to the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary, possibly based on a lost painting by Van Eyck. Characteristic of this artist's work, the frame has been made to look like a domestic shelf, enhancing the illusion of a painted shrine. Bought from John Windle Rare Books, 9/12/2016. Previously in Maggs Catalog 1319 (2001), number 58. A miniature of the same dimensions and details was described as f.14 in the Horae owned by Crawford of Lakelands, dismembered and sold at Christie's, 6/26/1991.