Two Saints and Two Bishops in a Historiated Initial "E" from a Choir Book

Sienese School · 1335/1400

Medium

Manuscript cutting in tempera and gold leaf, with Latin inscriptions in brownish-black ink, ruled in red ink, verso, on vellum

Original size

15.1 × 14.9 cm (6 × 5 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

A jewel of medieval Sienese manuscript art, this historiated initial "E" from a choir book distills an entire theological world into a few square inches of vellum, its gold leaf and tempera still luminous after six centuries. The Sienese School of the fourteenth century was renowned for its devotion to rich color and Byzantine-inflected spirituality, and this cutting exemplifies both. Manuscript illuminators like those working in Siena's great scriptoria did not merely decorate text — they constructed visual theology, each figure positioned and gilded according to centuries of iconographic tradition. The combination of burnished gold leaf with mineral-based tempera pigments gave Sienese work a radiance that fresco and panel painting could not match at this scale. The cutting survives as a single excised leaf, one of countless such fragments removed from choir books during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the antiquities market valued individual illuminations above intact manuscripts — a practice that has made works like this both precious and poignant. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's hieratic composition and warm gold tones onto canvas, preserving the intimate scale and devotional intensity that made Sienese illumination the standard of excellence across medieval Europe.