Title

Initial with the representation of Justice. Folio of a psalter from the Monastery of Santo Tomás de Ávila

Juan de Carrión [workshop of] (Documented in the last third of the 15th century)

Generic classification

Object

Date

Century

Cultural context / style

Material

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Iconography / Theme

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Inventory Number in Current Collection

Inscriptions / Marks

IVSTICIA EST SINGVLARVM RERVM ET PERSONARVM EQVISSIMA DISTRIBVCIO QVAM QVIS OBTINENS E FIADHEREI.
Justice is the most equitable distribution of things and people, which whoever possesses it must faithfully uphold.

Object history

Hernán Núñez Arnalte, treasurer and secretary of the Catholic Monarchs, set out to found a convent in Ávila. However, his illness did not allow him to carry it out, so it was his wife, María de Ávila, who financed it. She had the help of Fray Tomás de Torquemada in its execution. Thus, in 1480, after having delivered 1,500,000 maravedís, the construction of the monastery of Santo Tomás began (Fernández Pomar, 1986; Villaseñor, 2009). The monarchs favored its construction and endowed it with manuscripts of great quality. Part of these volumes are currently in the National Library of Madrid (Andrés, 1989); however, there are fragments scattered in other institutions and private collections.

This folio in which an initial appears belonged to a psalter from the monastery of Santo Tomás de Ávila. One of the reasons that caused the disintegration of the collections was the disentailment of 1836 (Scholz-Hänsel, 1992). Isidoro Rosell y Torres in 1874 lamented the loss of the manuscripts: "Due to the suppression of the religious communities of men, this immense building belonged for many years to the domain of a private individual. [...] It did not take long for the destructive revolutionary hand to demolish it, moved, almost always, by personal interest. Doña Isabel II had the good idea of rescuing it with funds from her patrimony and thus it was saved until now from its imminent ruin. This has not been the case with many of the precious objects of art with which the liberal hand of Isabel I endowed it. We have seen loose leaves torn from its choir books, illuminated with all the taste and richness of the arts at the end of the 15th century, a living example of vandalism, a dishonorable page in a period of our history, in which, neither out of pious respect nor artistic enthusiasm, the excesses of ignorance or bad faith were restrained" (Villaseñor, 2009).

According to Villaseñor (2009), part of the manuscript fragments were probably in the hands of Manuel Rico y Sinobas at the end of the 19th century. Soon after, he sold some loose pages to different collectors, among them the Reverend E. S. Dewick. In 1908 several of these folios were exhibited in an exhibition organized by the Burlington Fine Arts Club. The fragment appeared described as follows: "Justice, in an initial M. From a Choir-Psalter. Spanish. Between 1479 and 1492." The folio was purchased in 1918 by friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, who donated it to the institution, where it remains under Ms. 293a.

Description

A foliage of acanthus with flowers, animals, grotesques and the emblems of the Catholic Monarchs frame the scene. In this fragment appears the representation of Justice as the distributor of wealth. She is enthroned in the center of the composition wearing a rich crown. Around her seven women also crowned kneel, three to her left and four to her right. The scene shows Justice with a lap full of gold coins, which she drops to the ground. She holds a white phylactery with the inscription "Reddo unicuique secundum opera sua" (Villaseñor, 2009).

Locations

• ca. 1482 - ca. 1836

  monastery

  Santo Tomás de Ávila Monastery, Ávila (Spain)

• Mid XIX^th c. - XIX^th c.

  private collection

  Manuel Rico y Sinobas, Madrid (Spain) *

• XIX^th c. - ca. 1917

  private collection

  Reverend E. S. Dewick (United Kingdom) *

• 1918 - present

  museum

  The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (United Kingdom)