The Transfiguration, an illuminated cutting from a Book of Hours on vellum.    [France (eastern?), 15th century (c.1470s/80s)]

£6,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A highly expressive and unusual miniature from the renowned Burckhardt-Wildt album , showing the dominant figures of the scene in splendid detail, especially facial expressions. The figures, which often display big heads, high foreheads and snub noses, show links with the Master of Walters 222 who seems to have worked in Poitiers. As noted in Sotheby’s 1983 catalogue of the Burkhardt-Wildt collection, the subject of the illumination is extremely rare, taken from the life of Christ but illustrating the Office of the Virgin, in this case the surviving verso text of 12 lines is probably from Sext. The present cutting was one of six offered at the sale (originally Burckhardt-Wildt album ff. 34-35) whose verso texts are “consistent with the Use of Auxerre, Châlons, and Besançon, hinting at eastern French and possibly Burgundian origin”. Although the miniature is cropped this is somewhat redeemed by the fact that it has such an illustrious Swiss provenance from the late 18th century, belonging first to Peter Birmann (1758–1844), painter and art dealer, and then to the antiquarian Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt (1759–1819), whose highly important collection of cuttings was unknown until his descendants sold them at Sotheby’s a century and a half later. Daniel Burckhardt-Wildt, was a Basle silk ribbon manufacturer, connoisseur and minor artist whose family had been silk merchants from 1518. He was a member of the Künstlergesellschaft of Basel and after the French Revolution began to buy wor

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