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Cutting from a Choir Book

Creator

Italian Illuminator

Like many artists of the 1400s, especially in Siena, the artist known as the Master of the Osservanza was both a panel painter and a manuscript illuminator. Scholars named him for a triptych in a church just outside of Siena. The Church of the Osservanza, which is Italian for observance, was named for a reform movement among Franciscan friars trying to return to the purity of Saint Francis's ideal

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Date: about 1430
Medium: Tempera colors, gold leaf, gold paint, and ink
Culture: Italian
Department: Manuscripts
Institution: Getty Museum

Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, baptizes the adult Saint Augustine as he kneels on the rose and green marble floor of a church. Augustine's mother, Saint Monica, watches the event from the right. The illuminator almost certainly made this lively, colorful miniature for a choir book belonging to a congregation of Augustinian priests in Siena. The initial probably introduced the chants for a feast associated with Saint Augustine or Saint Monica. Scholars have not been able to establish a more precise identification, though they have associated it with other cuttings believed to be from the same manuscript.

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