Skeletonized leaf decorated with miniature painting.

[Miniature painting] / [Botany]. Consumatum est. S.l.: s.n., s.a. [late 18th century]. [11.5 x 7.4 cm], [1] f. ‘skeletonized’ oak leaf to which is attached a cut-out miniature painting. Minor abrasion to miniature, minor losses to leaf.
 
 
A very rare survival of an unusual category of devotional art: A ‘skeletonized’ oak leaf to which is affixed a cut miniature painting of the Virgin standing beside Christ on the Cross. The leaf was worked with a brush so that only the midrib and veins remained.
 
Adolf Spamer in his classic Das kleine Andachtsbild vom XIV bis zum XX Jahrhundert provides a useful note on the history of such items, which took several forms: “The production of such leaf skeletons, which achieved a certain renown in the 1720s, was initially a scientific experiment. In 1645, Marcus Aurelius Severimus, an anatomist and surgeon in Naples, is said to have produced a skeletonized palm leaf for the first time. In 1685, information about further successful experiments by Gabriel Clauder was published. At the beginning of the 18th century, the experiments of Friedrich Ruysch, a Dutchman, aroused the interest of wider circles (he himself did not report on them until 1723). Initially, after a method using insects to feed on the leaves proved inadequate, the production was carried out through decomposition processes. Cf. Johann Beckmann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen, vol. 4., part 2 (1796), pp. 212-33. Paul von Stetten the Younger (in Kunst-, Gewerb- und Handwerksgeschichte, vol. 2, p. 267), reports on the three Müller sisters in Augsburg, the so-called “Flormüllerinnen” (Flower Müllers), around 1740: “they also mastered the art of skeletonizing tree leaves.” Later, printed copies were made of leaves with figures of saints (as in the case of Lutzenberger in Altötting)”
 
 
*A. Spamer, Das kleine Andachtsbild vom XIV bis zum XX Jahrhundert, p. 324, plate CLXXX.