Female Saint in a Historiated Initial "L" from a Choir Book

Master of the Dominican Effigies · 1330/40

Medium

Manuscript cutting in tempera and gold leaf, with gothica textura inscriptions in Latin in black ink, ruled in red, on parchment

Original size

15.6 × 16.2 cm (6 3/16 × 6 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

This delicate manuscript cutting distills the devotional intensity of 14th-century Florentine illumination into a single gilded letter, its warmth undimmed after nearly seven centuries. The Master of the Dominican Effigies was active in Florence around 1320–1350, producing illuminated choir books for the city's Dominican convents — works designed not for private hands but for communal liturgical use, read aloud across the choir stalls of nuns and friars. His figures are immediately recognisable: solemn, frontal, rendered in liquid tempera against burnished gold leaf, their drapery articulated with fine, confident strokes that owe something to Giotto's monumental clarity while remaining rooted in the Byzantine tradition. The historiated initial — an ornamental letter housing a figural scene — was the primary vehicle for this kind of devotional imagery, and he brought to it an unusual psychological stillness. The Art Institute of Chicago holds several cuttings from the same workshop, suggesting these choir books were dispersed and collected across centuries as objects of independent artistic merit. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's luminous palette and iconic gravity onto canvas, preserving the jewel-like quality of the gold ground and the quiet authority of the saint's gaze.