Initial P: The Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds, cutting from a gradual

From the Getty Museum record

Painted by Bologna’s most important and prolific illuminator of the second half of the fourteenth century, Niccolò di Giacomo, this small historiated initial *P* belonged to a Christian choir book of the Carthusians of Spirito Santo in Lucca. It introduced the opening of the third Mass for the Feast of the Nativity of Christ. Several other initials in the Getty’s collection ([Ms. 86][1] and [Ms. 115][2]) may have also decorated the pages of the same manuscript. The pole holding up the shed’s roof serves to divide the image into two scenes, on one side, the Holy Family compsoed of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus, and on the other, the shepherds who hear of Christ’s arrival from an angel who darts down from heaven above. Niccolò’s vivid, voluminous figures almost completely fill the composition, lending the image a sense of monumentality. [1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/1096HV [2]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109NYV