Cutting from a Gradual: Initial I with Departure of Tobias (c. 1390): Art, History and Details

Cutting from a Gradual: Initial I with Departure of Tobias (c. 1390) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is "Master of Noah's Ark" (Italian).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Master of Noah’s Ark was named after an illuminated initial containing that subject now in the Vatican Library. Though he may have worked in Florence, he was unlikely to have been Florentine himself. This rare miniature depicts the story from the apocrypha of Tobias, son of Tobit, a devout Jew in exile who is blind and destitute. Sent out to visit relatives in a distant city in order to find a means of supporting the family, the young Tobias is guided by the Archangel Raphael. This miniature shows the sad and traumatic moment of Tobias’s departure in “continuous narrative” within the same scene (right to left). Within the doorway Tobit and his wife, Anna, are apprehensive. In the center, Tobit prays to God, represented here as the Trinity with two faces and the flame of the Holy Ghost. On the left, Tobias departs with his staff over his shoulder. This initial I would have introduced the text Inclina, Domine, aurem tuam ad me (Turn your ear, O Lord, and hear me). It marks the opening of the 15th Sunday after Pentecost and the beginning of the Introit to the Mass.

Object facts

• Title: Cutting from a Gradual: Initial I with Departure of Tobias
• Date: c. 1390
• Creator attribution: "Master of Noah's Ark" (Italian)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 17.8 x 17.4 cm (7 x 6 7/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.68

A detail from the museum

The volume from which this leaf comes is located at the central library of the Augustinian Province of Italy.

Collection credit

The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fliegel, Stephen N. The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection of Manuscript Illuminations. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.
• Signorello, Lucrezia "Musica picta restituta. La libreria di coro di Sant'Agostino di Siena e il ritrovamento dei cutting miniati," Analecta Augustiniana Vol. LXXXC (2022).
• Signorello, Lucrezia, "Cutting e dintorni. La Libreria di coro di Sant'Agostino de Siena tra conservazione e dispersione," Teca Vol. 12 No. 6ns (2022).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.