Leaf from a Psalter: The Crucifixion (c. 1300–1330): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Psalter: The Crucifixion (c. 1300–1330) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The diocese of Liège was extremely active as a production center for psalters and psalter-hours from the second half of the 1200s through about 1330. This market, no doubt, was stimulated by the need of women for a devotional text. As women were drawn to the convents of religious orders such as the Dominicans, the Beguines and Begards, and the Poor Clares, they had need of a book that would provide them with suitable devotional material. The psalter was the book that these women, many of whom were high-born, most commonly used. The present leaf, with its monumental miniature of the Crucifixion, and like many surviving 13th-century psalters, may have thus provided visual focus for the prayers of a woman in a convent setting. Customarily, the level of quality and the extent to which these books were decorated depended upon the means of the patron.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Psalter: The Crucifixion
• Date: c. 1300–1330
• Culture: Flanders, Liège, 14th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 9.4 x 7.3 cm (3 11/16 x 2 7/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.54

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.
• George, Philippe. Art et Patrimoine en Wallonie des Origines à 1789: Essai de Synthèse à la Lumière des Collections Américaines et Européennes. Namur: Institut du Patrimoine Wallon, 2017.
• Gertsman, Elina and Barbara H. Rosenwein. The Middle Ages in 50 Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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.