Angel with Portative Organ

Cristoforo Cortese

ca. 1401–7 · Tempera and gold on parchment · Robert Lehman Collection

This miniature, together with another illuminated music-making angel (Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.1.2465b), is a fragment of the decorative border of a manuscript folio. The leaf may have belonged to an antiphonary—a choir book containing sung portions of the Divine Office—that was commissioned in 1401 for the newly founded Dominican Convent of Corpus Domini in Venice. These miniatures were illuminated by Cristoforo Cortese, the most famous and prolific Venetian illuminator of the first half of the fifteenth century, and are his earliest known works.

Artist

Cristoforo Cortese

Date

ca. 1401–7

Medium

Tempera and gold on parchment

Department

Robert Lehman Collection

Credit line

Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 1975.1.2465ab