Single Miniature Excised from Boccaccio's Des Cleres et nobles femmes: Queen Medusa and Her Court (c. 1470): Art, History and Details

Single Miniature Excised from Boccaccio's Des Cleres et nobles femmes: Queen Medusa and Her Court (c. 1470) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Maître François (French).

The work and its context

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

This miniature comes from the French translation of a book by the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). A compilation of biographies of famous women, Boccaccio’s work remained popular in France throughout the 1400s, especially with aristocratic bibliophiles, and was usually beautifully illustrated in the form of a deluxe manuscript. Shown here is the miniature introducing the chapter dealing with the legend of Queen Medusa. Surrounded by her courtiers, Medusa instructs the reader on the disadvantages of possessing wealth, which brings fear and superstition as well as loss of sleep, security, and peace of mind.

Object facts

• Title: Single Miniature Excised from Boccaccio's Des Cleres et nobles femmes: Queen Medusa and Her Court
• Date: c. 1470
• Creator attribution: Maître François (French)
• Culture: France
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Sheet: 13 x 9.1 cm (5 1/8 x 3 9/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1924.1015

A detail from the museum

Medusa is shown here with her attendants before she was turned into the gorgon, a fierce frightening monster.

Collection credit

Gift from J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• W. M. M. “Illuminated Miniatures in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 12, no. 4 (April 1925): 61–71.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1928.

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.