album;
drawing
- Museum number
- 1889,0527.73
- Description
-
'The Florentine Picture-Chronicle' page from the album (recto of 1889,0527.74): the Cumaean Sibyl standing by the mouth of a cave pointing to a flaming opening with devils, the scene continued from the left-hand side of the opening (1889,0527.72)
Pen and brown ink and brown wash over black chalk
- Production date
- 1470-1475 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 326 millimetres
-
Width: 226 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Watermark: three mounts below a cross
In Book VI of Virgil's 'Aeneid' (30-19 BC) Aeneas meets the Cumaean sibyl who acts as his guide in the underworld.
Lit.: S. Colvin, 'A Florentine Picture Chronicle', London, 1898; A.E. Popham and P. Pouncey, 'Italian drawings in the BM, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries', London, 1950, I, no. 274, II, pls. CCXXXVII-CCXLI.
For Popham & Pouncey 1950 entry see 1889,0527.1
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
BM, 'Padua in the 1450s', 1998, no. 16
- Acquisition date
- 1889
- Acquisition notes
- Popham & Pouncey 1950
The leaves of the book, in its present state, seem to be numbered 5 to 59 in a seventeenth(?)-century hand; the numbers, in the r.-hand top corner, have in many cases been partly trimmed away. The book was broken up by Ruskin, who was in the habit of lending parts of his books and manuscripts to friends and institutions in which he was interested, with the result that when the Museum purchased it from him in 1889 it contained only 49 folios. Of the remainder, two (1890,0314.1-4. Folios 13 and 14) were presented the next year by the trustees of the Ruskin Museum, Sheffield, and four (1900,0526.1-8. Folios 9, 22, 36, and 47) in 1900 by Ruskin's cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn; folios 1 to 4 are missing, but there is nothing to indicate that they were not removed before Ruskin acquired the book.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1889,0527.73
