Page from a manuscript Bible.

A superb leaf from a very high-quality quarto bible with St. Peter standing in an initial "P." Attributed to the Dominican Painter or associate. The text from the Epistle of St. Jacob (2:24) to the First Epistle of St. Peter is preceded by a very finely painted historiated initial "P," it's corpus 7 lines high and the descender extending the whole height to 30 lines.
Lay-out for 51 lines, 2 columns. The page is written in a slightly rounded gothic bookhand, headings in red, alternately blue, and red initials for new chapters. Captions in the upper- and side margins are also in alternative blue and red initials.

St. Peter is portrayed with great delicacy in a blue robe with a pink wrap, standing in the initial and holding the key of the Kingdom of Heaven. His head is round with a clearly visible tonsure. The tubular folds of the wrap cover his left hand holding the key. The initial itself is painted on a burnished gold ground; the corpus refined by white palmette design and with a half-human animal head as terminal.
The style of illumination displays a fine example of the Dominican painter or his associates, who were active in Paris around 1255-60.

Robert Branner, in his Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of St.Louis calls the Dominican Painter "a rare and original painter, fundamentally different from his colleagues" (p. 118). His mature style is marked by the control of movement, heavy drawing, tubular and pointed folds in the drapery, the figures enlivened by personality.
The heads of the figures, like our St. Peter, may be round, in contrast to other workshops in Paris, where the heads were painted elongated and large compared to the body.
The artist(s) favored drapery of tubular folds: rounded, broken, and pointed. The wrap-around St. Peter is a fairly good example. (Cf. Branner, fig. 363). Small gold dots served as decoration of the initial corpus; of these, only one is found here at the very end.
Humor and satire were often present in the Dominican painter workshop, for example, in an initial of St. John, holding two scrolls at the time, with the identical inscription "Johannes Secunda," indicating the start of the Second Epistle (p. 121). The name "Dominican Painter" is derived from the third volume of the great Dominican Bible in Paris (Bibl. Nat. Latin 16721), which the miniaturist finished, before moving on to the next volume of the work (16722).
It probably was his last work, for which the terminus ante quem of 1256 exists. The painter and his associates were only a few in number, and so were their works, says Branner. They must have been active between 1250-55 and possibly shortly before that.

Reference: Cf. Robert Branner, Manuscript Painting in Paris during the Reign of St.Louis, A Study of Styles. Berkeley-London, 1977, pp. 118-126.