Miniature Excised from the "Potocki Psalter": The Deposition (c. 1240–1250): Art, History and Details

Miniature Excised from the "Potocki Psalter": The Deposition (c. 1240–1250) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of the Potocki Workshop (French, Paris).

The work and its context

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

This detached leaf derives from a Parisian luxury psalter. Psalters were books containing the 150 biblical psalms and commonly used for private devotion. It provides a superb example of Parisian Gothic painting at its most refined stage, with strong emphasis on line and color. It illustrates the new court style of King Louis IX (1214–1270) in which tall figures assume sinuous postures and the drapery forms large broken folds around the body. The high quality of the painting suggests the original psalter was destined for an aristocratic patron. The manuscript to which this miniature once belonged, the Potocki Psalter, is named after its last private owner, the Polish count Stanislaus Potocki (1755–1821). It is today preserved in the National Library of Warsaw in Poland.

Object facts

• Title: Miniature Excised from the "Potocki Psalter": The Deposition
• Date: c. 1240–1250
• Creator attribution: Master of the Potocki Workshop (French, Paris)
• Culture: France, Paris
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Sheet: 15.4 x 10 cm (6 1/16 x 3 15/16 in.); Framed: 44.5 x 34.3 cm (17 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 30.5 cm (16 x 12 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1985.80

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Holger A. Klein. Sacred Gifts and Worldly Treasures: Medieval Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.

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.