Lot 30: Germano (b.1819) or Alberto Prosdocimi, attr. (1852-1925) - St Michael Archangel, miniature on vellum, Venice, late 19th century

Germano (b.1819) or Alberto Prosdocimi, attr. (1852-1925)
St Michael Archangel, miniature on vellum, Venice, late 19th century

A splendidly accomplished 19th-century facsimile painting of a miniature from the famed Grimani Breviary.

223 x 164mm. The corresponding miniature in the Grimani Breviary is f.746v.

Although unsigned, this miniature bears all the hallmarks of the facsimile copies of the famous Grimani Breviary (Venice, Bib. Marciana, MS lat. XI 67 [7531]) painted by Alberto Prosdocimi, or by his father Germano, with whom he is often confused (for Germano's involvement in reproducing facsimiles of the Grimani Breviary from has early as the 1850s, see Filippin 2016). Alberto Prosdocimi was born in Venice on 9 September 1852; he studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti and after working in watercolours for a time, specialised as a miniaturist. He was renowned for his vedute of Venice, and was commissioned by Queen Margherita to paint a portrait of the Prince of Naples (subsequently Vittorio Emanuele III).

In an age prior to the development of mechanical methods for high-quality colour reproduction, Prosdocimi's copies of the Grimani Breviary were highly valued by manuscript connoisseurs. Ambroise Firmin-Didot, for example, owned several (Sandra Hindman, Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age, 2001, p.168, fig. 75). Chromolithographs of many of its miniatures were already published in 1864 in Léon Curmer’s Les Évangiles des dimanches et fêtes de l’année suivis de prières a la saint Vierge et aux saints (Paris) from copies supplied by Germano Prosdocimi. Curmer himself included an essay on the Grimani Breviary where he praised the superiority and faithfulness of Germano’s brush (see Holy Hoaxes, cat nos 51-54).