Historiated miniature. Northern France, c. 1500.

Miniature on a cutting from a choirbook.

Size: 29.5 x 22cm (11.4 x 8.5 inches)

Large initial "D", in soft purple highly stylized acanthus-leaf sprays heightened with white, enclosing Christ on a Donkey before a crowd of his followers, approaching Jerusalem (here as a medieval walled city), as the inhabitants come out to spread costly fabrics on the ground ahead of him, or peer over the parapets and from a tree at the scene, all on powdered gold ground, surrounded by a border on two sides of acanthus-leaf sprays and flowers on gold ground, and with the text below the initial cut away and replaced with a piece cut from the bas-de-page (probably from the same leaf) with a coat of arms which are perhaps those of the chapter of Saint-Julien from Pruillé-l'équille in arr. Saint-Calais, with a laurel wreath, remnants of two lines of text with music on 4-line red staves on verso.