Splendors of the Serenissima in a Digital Age: The Master of the Murano Gradual Reconsidered

The manuscript has not been digitized, and only six of the illuminations have been reproduced, often in black and white with a single color reproduction of the only full-page miniature.2 A fenestra (or window) label on the binding indicates that this gradual was the fourth in the set for San Mattia.3 The original series of songbooks survives in a dispersed and fragmentary condition as follows: * The Berlin volume containing chants of the temporale portion of the liturgical year (those related to the life of Christ) from Easter Sunday until the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost; * Dispersed cuttings of over fifty known historiated initials by the Murano Master(s) in twenty-six collections across Europe, Russia, and the United States that likely formed part of multiple volumes, including the sanctorale feasts (those commemorating the lives of saints), a hymnal, and an antiphonary for services of the Divine Office (Appendix A);4 and * A second temporale volume, from the first Sunday in Advent to the second Sunday in Lent, presently in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan (MS AB. The authors have embraced virtual messaging and meeting platforms to simultaneously study many of the manuscripts and cuttings discussed below on multiple occasions, thereby creating a real-time method for international collaboration even before the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an increase in digital approaches to collaborative research. [...]in the initial with Saint Margaret (Appendix A, no. 28), the Murano Master used the dragon to form part of the bar of the letter itself-another testament to the artist's creativity. The volume was purchased by the Kupferstichkabinett in 1888, auctioned by the German government in 1898, then reacquired by the state library in 1903.11 The Milan Gradual was recorded at the Palazzo Brera in 1810 but without additional evidence for how it arrived there.12 At least sixteen of the initials from the remaining dispersed volumes were sold at Sotheby's, London, in 1838 in the public sale of William Young Ottley (1771-1836), who likely acquired them during his travels in Italy in the 1790s (he mentions acquiring them from Murano; Appendix B).