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The Sforza Hours' A NEWLY DISCOVERED LEAF OF 'THE SFORZA HOURS' M. L. EVANS IN 1894, twenty-three years after the discovery of the Sforza Hours (BL, Add. MS. 34294) and shortly after its presentation to the British Museum, Sir G. F. Warner, in his monograph on the manuscript, drew attention to a letter from the Milanese illuminator Giovan Pietro Birago. ^ Neither the date nor the addressee was stated in the letter, which sought that a certain Fra Gian Jacopo, then imprisoned in Milan, be detained until he had compensated the writer for the theft of an unfinished book of hours, upon which Birago had been engaged for Bona Sforza, dowager Duchess of Milan. It seems that part of this book was already in Bona's possession and that the stolen fragment had been taken by the thief to Rome, where it had been acquired by Giovanni Maria Sforza, a bastard half-brother of Bona's deceased husband and a future archbishop of Genoa. Although Warner realized both that the Sforza Hours had belonged to Bona and that it had been mutilated, he was too exact a scholar to conclude on this evidence alone that this manuscript was identical with that mentioned in the letter. Over sixty years were to pass before his intuition was proven correct by the discovery of Birago's signature on the illuminated frontispiece of a volume of Antonio Zarotto's Sforziada^ printed at Milan in 1490.^ This frontispiece, in Warsaw, and those in two further presentation copies of the same book, in Paris and London, are demonstrably by the Master of the Sforza Hours, as Birago was previously known.^ Birago's letter claimed that the stolen part of the manuscript was worth 500 ducats, which indicates that it must have been richly decorated. Despite his plea, the missing leaves were not returned and it seems likely that Bona had abandoned the project by 1494. In that year Ludovico il Moro assumed the title of Duke of Milan, brushing aside the claim of the young Francesco Sforza, his nephew's son and Bona's grandson. Utterly excluded from power by her brother-in-law, Bona returned to her native Savoy in 1495 as the guest of her nephew. Duke Phillibert II. She died at Fossano in 1503 and the unfinished manuscript was inherited by Phillibert, who died the following year. The book of hours then became the property of his widow, Margaret of Austria, who moved to the Netherlands in 1506. In 1517 she entrusted the scribe Etienne de Lale with the task of writing missing text pages and putting the book in order and in 1519-21 commissioned Gerard Horenbout to execute sixteen additional large miniatures, two 'vignettes' and a number of decorated letters, and to write some more text pages.''" The decorative 21 programme of the Sforza Hours thus assumed its present form. The book may then have been presented to Margaret's nephew, the Emperor Charles V.^ Such a provenance would account for its removal to Spain, where it was purchased by Sir J. C. Robinson in 1871.^ Owing to the separation of the leaves of the Sforza Hours, it is impossible to establish its original collation. However, the pages added on the instructions of Margaret of Austria are generally identifiable by the style of their script, capitals, and miniatures. This permits a partial identification of the stolen parts of the manuscript. The replacement folios include six in the Gospel extracts (which in all occupy fols. 1-12 of the manuscript), forty in the Hours of the Virgin (fols. 41 -136^), twelve in the Passion according to St Luke (fols. 137-166^), thirteen in the Prayers to the Virgin (fols. 169^-185^), a single folio in the Memorials of the Saints (fols. 186-212^), eight in the Penitential Psalms (fols. 213-235^), twelve in the Litany (fols. 236-57), and twenty-five in the Oflice of the Dead (fols. 257^-342^)."^ The Hours of the Holy Spirit (fols. 28-40^) and the short Prayers to Our Lord on the Passion (fols. 167-9) apparently survived unscathed, both in text and decoration. At first sight, the splendid series of full-page miniatures in the Memorials of the Saints seems complete, only the favourite Burgundian saint Andrew having been added by Horenbout (fol. 189^). However, in the Memorials, the text and miniature pertaining to each saint invariably appears on the recto and verso of the same folio. It is consequently impossible to tell how much (if any) of this section is missing. Horenbout replaced single missing miniatures in the Gospel extracts (fol. 10^) and the Penitential Psalms (fol. 212^) and added one half-page miniature to open the Hours of the Cross (fol. 12^). The Passion according to St Luke has only one Horenbout miniature (fol. 136^). However, Birago's Passion cycle is incomplete and it seems likely that additional miniatures were intended to appear between fols. 154 and 159 and, possibly, on fol. 163 (all of which are undecorated replacement text pages). In the Hours of the Virgin, which one would expect to be extensively decorated, the whole of Birago's Marian cycle was abstracted, requiring nine replacement miniatures of Horenbout (fols. 41, 61, 82"^, 91,97, 104^, III, 124, and 133^). Both the Prayers to the Virgin and the Office of the Dead include large proportions of added folios, so it is possible that they too were originally intended to have extensive cycles of miniatures. In the present state of the manuscript, each of these sections has only two full-page miniatures: in each case one by Birago and one by Horenbout (in the Prayers to the Virgin the miniature on fol. 177^ is by Horenbout, as is the miniature on fol. 257^ of the Oflice of the Dead). As we shall see, it also appears that the calendar was removed, though not replaced by Margaret of Austria. There may indeed be further sections of the original book which are missing in their entirety. 1. In 1941 a miniature of the Adoration of the Magt by Birago was presented to the Museum (Add. MS. 45722). It was recognized as an element of the decoration of the Hours of the Virgin from the Sforza Hours, its place having been filled with Horenbout's depiction of the same scene on fol. 97 of the manuscript. ^ The margin of the detached leaf is trimmed up to the edge of the painted frame of the miniature and an eighteenth-century engraving titled La B. Vergin(e) Del Rosario is pasted on the verso. The latter is inscribed 22 in a nineteenth-century hand 'Ancienne Coll. Davillier', presumably a reference to the collector Baron Jean Charles Davillier (1823-83). As one might expect with a manuscript cutting which has apparently not been pasted into an album, this miniature is in a poorer state of preservation than the illuminations which were eventually augmented and bouna to constitute Add. MS. 34294. It is rather faded overall, with some flaking. Birago's Adoration of the Magi is of considerable interest, both because it permits a direct comparison with Horenbout's representation of the same subject and because it provides incontrovertible evidence that the decorative programme of the Sforza Hours was mutilated, rather than merely left unfinished. The late Paul Wescher's interest in the Sforza Hours dates from several years before the discovery of the detached miniature of the Adoration of the Magi. In a letter published in 1936 he had drawn attention to Margaret of Austria's payments of 1517 to the scribe Etienne de Lale for the writing of the additional text pages in the manuscript.^ Many years later, in a footnote to an article on a different artist, Wescher noted that he had seen two calendar miniatures from the Sforza Hours in the collection of Tammaro de Marinis in Florence. ^° This dramatic revelation passed unnoticed until very recently, after it had been repeated in his entry on Birago in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.^^ Indeed, it is probable that the discovery would have remained unremarked upon, had it not been for the appearance in 1984 of the calendar page from the Sforza Hours which is the subject of this note. This leaf was brought to the attention of British Library staff during the run of the exhibition 'Renaissance Painting in Manuscripts' in the United States and after many centuries has entered the same collection as the other parts of the Sforza Hours. It now forms Add. MS. 62997. In the present state of knowledge, it is impossible to state whether it is identical with one of the pair of calendar miniatures which Wescher saw in de Marinis's collection. However, given that de Marinis kept much of his valuable stock in Lausanne and that the newly discovered leaf was previously in the possession of a Swiss collector, this is by no means implausible. Measuring 115 x 85 mm.. Add. MS. 62997 has been framed between two sheets of glass, one of which is now broken. The miniature is stained by damp, badly flaked in places, and has become partially attached to the glass. For the last reason, it was judged unwise to attempt to remove the frame of the leaf and it is illustrated here in its glazed state (fig. i). The miniature depicts an elegantly dressed young man with long blond hair seated by a rose bush and a stream. Before him are ranged a dwarf offering a dish (of fruit?), three young women proffering chaplets of roses, and five young men, some of whom are playing musical instruments and singing.
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