VENETIAN SCHOOL, FIRST HALF OF 16TH CENTURY

This is a full-page miniature from either a Doge’s commission (commissione dogale) or a mariegola. The statutes of guilds and confraternities were customarily the subject of illuminated frontispieces of mariegole, which often included the Crucifixion and the patron saint of the society, with the coat of arms of the holder of the commission. The present miniature can for instance be compared with a leaf from a Doge’s commission executed in Venice by the Maestro degli Alberi from circa 1540-1550 in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Marlay cutting It. 45; see N. Morgan and S. Panayotova, A Catalogue of Western Book Illumination in the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Cambridge Colleges, London, 2011, I, part 2, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, no. 86, ill.).