Leaf from a Choir Psalter: Initial B with King David in Prayer (c. 1460–1470): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Choir Psalter: Initial B with King David in Prayer (c. 1460–1470) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Maestro del Messale Barbo (Italian).

The work and its context

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

Psalters contained all 150 biblical psalms. Specific pages within the psalter were decorated with historiated initials to highlight the liturgical divisions. In addition to providing embellishment, such initials served as a visual aid to the user to assist in locating a text. The most prominent of these was Psalm 1, which begins Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum (Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly), and which traditionally featured the grandest initial of all. An enlarged B was customarily filled with a scene representing King David, the author of the Psalms. Here David kneels in prayer within a bright green landscape of craggy rocks and trees. Above, God the Father, with orb in hand, looks down from heaven as he blesses David with his right hand. The author of the initial is named after a missal he illuminated for Marco Barbo, Bishop of Treviso, from 1455 to 1464 (now in Padua). He worked mainly in Lombardy and the Veneto during the 1450s and 1460s, and manuscripts illuminated by him are known to have been destined for patrons in Brescia and Padua.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Choir Psalter: Initial B with King David in Prayer
• Date: c. 1460–1470
• Creator attribution: Maestro del Messale Barbo (Italian)
• Culture: Northern Italy, Lombardy and the Veneto, 15th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 54 x 37.5 cm (21 1/4 x 14 3/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.70

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.

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.