Getty Museum
Initial G: Saint Blaise
Creator
Master of the Murano GradualItalian Illuminator · 1430–1460
All works by this person →The Master of the Murano Gradual takes his name from a gradual (a type of choir book containing the sung portions of the mass) that was disbound at some point in the past and now exists only as a series of cuttings and leaves in several collections. The gradual may have originally come from the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele in Murano. The Master of the Murano Gradual is one of the most dist
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1450–1460
- Medium
- Tempera and gold
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Manuscripts
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In this initial, the face of Saint Blaise is sharply defined, craggy, and hard-edged, yet the powder blue robe and the fine tooled lines in the gold ground lend the monumental figure a kind of ethereal delicacy. These contrasting qualities of exaggerated expression and refined beauty inform the illumination style of the work's artist, the Master of the Murano Gradual. This initial was probably made for the manuscript that gives the Master his name, a gradual made for the Camaldolese monastery of San Mattia in Murano. Saint Blaise, a fourth-century bishop in Armenia, was martyred with a wool carder's brush, the red object he holds in his hand in the illumination.
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