A cutting, 140 by 100mm, trimmed to the edges of the scene with God seated on a rainbow, his feet resting on a globe, at his ears a lily and a sword held by two angels, at his feet Mary and John the Baptist kneeling, in pale washes with details picked out in hairline gold strokes, doubtless copied from an engraving, ornamental dark pink acanthus leaf sprays at head and foot the last remnant of the painted frame the scene was cut from, the reverse with three lines of music on a 5-line red stave (rastrum: 30mm) with two lines of text in Old Czech in the distinctively spiky and angular Bohemian script, some slight flaking to paint in places, stains and scuffs around edge of reverse from last mounting, overall good condition
"The social and religious upheavals of fifteenth-century Bohemia gave its musical tradition a unique national character. The execution of the popular Church critic, Johann Hus, in 1415, lead to the Hussite Wars of 1419-36 and the resulting collapse of the Church in much of the country. In this partial vacuum the Hussite Utraquist religious movement gave great prominence to vernacular music, producing Utraquist liturgical books, intended for use by educated laymen and secular choirs, rather than priests. Medieval manuscripts in Old Czech are of great rarity on the market: a Book of Hours in Czech, dated 1466, was sold in the Dyson Perrins sale at Sotheby's, 9 December 1958, lot 24; and three small fragments of a fourteenth-century Czech translation of the Legenda Aurea were sold by Bloomsbury Auctions, 8 July 2015, lot 34. To these should be added a handful of manuscripts dating from the sixteenth century or later in Middle Czech: two cuttings from sixteenth-century choirbooks were sold by Sotheby's, 5 July 2011, lot 26 and 8 July 2014, lot 31 (the latter of these, at least, most probably from the same parent manuscript as the present cutting); a leaf from a sixteenth-century choirbook in Czech was Quaritch, cat. 1147, Bookhands of the Middle Ages V (1991), no. 72; and an Antiphoner in Czech of c. 1600 was sold by Christie's, New York, as part of the Cornelius Hauck collection on 27 June 2006, lot 266"
