Page from a Choirbook with Christ and a Pharisee in a Historiated Initial “D”

Master of the Cypresses · 1430/90

Medium

Manuscript cutting in tempera and gold leaf, with rounded gothica textualis inscriptions in brownish black ink, ruled in red, on parchment

Original size

Initial: 18 × 21 cm (7 1/8 × 8 5/16 in.); Text block: 69 × 46 cm (27 3/16 × 18 1/8 in.); Leaf: 88 × 58.9 cm (34 11/16 × 23 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This jewel-like manuscript cutting distils an entire theological encounter — Christ facing a Pharisee — into the carved space of a single ornate initial letter, painted with the precision and intimacy that only medieval illumination achieves. The Master of the Cypresses is a name assigned by modern scholars to an anonymous illuminator working in northern Italy between roughly 1430 and 1490, a period when the Gothic manuscript tradition was still flourishing even as Renaissance panel painting was reshaping Italian art. Working in tempera and gold leaf on parchment, this artist produced images whose rich, compressed colour and luminous gilding were designed to be read from close range, held in the hands of a choir or cleric. Cuttings like this one were widely separated from their parent manuscripts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when collectors prized individual illuminated pages as objects in their own right — which is how this fragment came to rest in the Art Institute of Chicago. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the warmth of those original pigments and the flicker of gold leaf into a medium that carries the weight and quiet intensity of the original into any interior.