The Discovery of a Lost 1632 Polish Choirbook

How an absolutely huge manuscript leaf, a tiny dolphin and a forgotten Dominican artist helped recover the story of an extraordinary book made in seventeenth-century Poznań.

At first, it looks almost medieval.

The parchment is enormous, over 60 centimetres high. Across it run lines of Gregorian chant in black and red, designed to be read not by one person at a desk but by a group of friars standing together in choir. Between the music are great decorated initials, interlaced strands, gilding, strange forms and, hidden among the ornament, a small dolphin - something quite unexpected to see in a manuscript from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which was not exactly famous for its dolphins. Yet this manuscript was not made in the Middle Ages.

It was made in Poznań in 1632, at the height of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And the closer I looked at it, the more interesting its story became.

What emerged was not simply the identification of an isolated manuscript leaf, but the reconstruction of part of a monumental Polish choirbook whose contents were dispersed long ago, and a strong new attribution to Błażej Derey OP, one of the most distinctive Polish manuscript artists of the seventeenth century.

 

A book made to be seen from across a choir

The surviving leaf measures approximately 600 × 410 mm. It is written on parchment, ruled in red and covered with the large musical notation characteristic of a choirbook. Its scale tells us immediately how it was used. This was not a personal prayer book. A manuscript of this size would have been placed on a lectern so that several Dominican friars could sing from the same page.

The parent volume was a Kyriale, a liturgical choirbook containing the musical settings of the ordinary parts of the Mass. Surviving evidence from its frontispiece identifies it with the Dominican convent at Poznań and dates it to 1632. The inscription reportedly also named Jerzy Trebnic, Provincial Prior of the Polish Dominicans, and Jacek Choryński, prior at Poznań, while recording that its chant followed a Dominican edition associated with Seraphinus Siccus.

So the date and institutional origin of the manuscript were already recoverable. Those details were given when the same leaf was offered for sale at auction in London in 2022. What had been missed was the identity of the man who made it.

 

The dolphin

One of the smallest details on the page provided one of the most useful clues. Among the decoration is a stylised dolphin. On its own, that would prove very little. But it appears alongside a whole group of features strongly associated with the work of the Polish Dominican friar Błażej Derey, including elaborate interlace, muted yellows and earth colours, ornamental lettering, gilded or metallic backgrounds and zoomorphic forms.

Derey, born around 1587 and dying in 1666, was a Dominican scribe and illuminator whose known manuscripts preserve a highly individual style. His surviving output includes an antiphonal of 1627, another of 1630, a Supplementum Gradualis of 1630, and substantial graduals dated 1632, 1633 and 1635. The comparison becomes particularly striking because Derey was working on major Dominican choirbooks in Poznań at exactly this moment.

Recent scholarship has focused on a three-part Graduale de tempore et de sanctis written between 1632 and 1635 for the Dominican nuns of Piotrków Trybunalski. That manuscript, now preserved in the Archive of the Polish Province of the Dominicans in Kraków, contains a large body of historicising initials and ornament attributable to Derey. Scholars have emphasised precisely the deliberate continuation of medieval-looking decorative forms in these seventeenth-century Dominican books. Indeed, another leaf from the same parent manuscript as our leaf was sold a few years ago at Christie's in London but erroneously dated a century too early - quite understandable given Derey's anachronistic style.

Placed beside those manuscripts, the decoration of the Poznań Kyriale begins to look much less anonymous. The date is right. The religious order is right. The place is right. The decorative vocabulary is right. So near the end of August 2026 I contacted a renowned expert in Polish Dominican manuscripts at the Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk (PAN) who generously helped to support the attribution.

The most interesting conclusion is therefore not that a seventeenth-century artist happened to imitate medieval forms. It is that this enormous lost choirbook belongs directly to a known Polish Dominican manuscript workshop operating in Poznań in 1632.

 

A manuscript from an extraordinary moment in Poznań

The date matters for another reason. 1632 was an exceptional year for artistic patronage among the Poznań Dominicans. At the same Dominican complex, a monumental painting of the Battle of Lepanto was commissioned in 1632 for the Rosary Chapel. Associated with the Italian-born royal painter Tomasso Dolabella, the vast composition combined the naval victory at Lepanto with Polish religious and political imagery, including the rosary procession connected with the Polish victory at Chocim. It survives today in the collection at Wawel Castle.

The intellectual world behind these commissions overlaps intriguingly. Jacek Choryński, whose name was reportedly recorded in the Kyriale, was a Dominican preacher and theologian active in Poznań. Only a few years earlier, in 1628, he had published a funeral sermon for the powerful Wielkopolska magnate Adam Sędziwój Czarnkowski. Scholarship on the Battle of Lepanto has identified Choryński as a possible intellectual force behind the painting's elaborate programme.

The choirbook therefore belongs to a monastery that was not simply copying old liturgical texts. It was actively commissioning ambitious art, shaping religious imagery and participating in the cultural life of seventeenth-century Poland. Derey's manuscript art fits this setting remarkably well.

His work is deliberately archaic. Interlace, monumental lettering and manuscript illumination continued visual traditions hundreds of years old even as printed books had become normal throughout Europe. The persistence of such forms was not necessarily artistic backwardness. In a liturgical context, antiquity could convey authority, continuity and sacred tradition. A choirbook could therefore look medieval precisely because that was part of what gave it meaning.

 

Then the book disappeared

The Poznań Dominican community itself had existed since the thirteenth century. The friars arrived in the city around 1231 and were established on the left bank of the Warta in 1244. Their historic convent survived until 1833, when, like so many others, it was suppressed under Prussian rule.

The consequences of the Prussian suppressions for monastic collections in Wielkopolska were severe. Archival research records the removal of books, archives and furnishings from dissolved religious houses, with collections broken apart, transferred, sold, given away or destroyed. 

One spectacular leaf from the parent manuscript entered the collection of the American bibliophile Cornelius J. Hauck and had been deposited in Cincinnati by 1966, showing that the parent manuscript had been dispersed into individual leaves by at least then, probably in the United States. It later appeared in the great sale of the Hauck collection at Christie's New York in 2006, where it was catalogued a century too early, a very typical fate of leaves dispersed from their original manuscript (the original frontispiece included the 1632 date). Other leaves passed through the manuscript dealer Bruce Ferrini during the 1990s. Further examples rarely appear individually on the international market.

The original book has become a collection of beautiful fragments. Its Polish identity survived, but imperfectly. It's very likely that other leaves are out there misunderstood as being of some non-Polish origin. Its artistic identity appears to have disappeared altogether.

 

What the market has repeatedly missed for decades

This is the part of the story that interests me most. The manuscript had not been completely forgotten. Previous cataloguers had already made significant progress. By 2022, the same leaf now in our possession was offered at auction for £2,000-£3,000 (GBP) and was correctly connected with a Kyriale made for the Poznań Dominicans in 1632. But the manuscript was still being treated essentially as an anonymous seventeenth-century Polish liturgical book. That description was accurate. It was also incomplete.

Once the decoration was compared with Derey's securely attributed manuscripts, the entire object changed character. This was no longer simply a decorative leaf from a lost Polish choirbook. It appeared to be a previously unrecognised work by a named Polish artist whose manuscript production is the subject of active modern scholarship as well as scholarship in the 1960s by Robert Świętochowski.

The scale makes the identification still more remarkable. Derey's surviving choirbooks are large, but generally around 38 to 40 centimetres in height. The Poznań Kyriale was approximately 60 centimetres tall. It therefore represents a manuscript conceived on a considerably more monumental scale than the principal surviving books currently associated with him.

Fragments have been visible on the market several times over the course of decades. The information needed to understand it was also visible. The connection between the two simply had not been made until now. This is made all the more significant by the fact that in the pre-war and post-war literature consulted by the expert we contacted, no information concerning any manuscripts produced by Derey from Poznań were known to exist - the historical trace of the existence of the parent manuscript had vanished. 

 

Reconstructing a lost Polish book

A single manuscript leaf can look like a small survival. In reality, fragments can sometimes tell us almost as much about a vanished book as complete volumes do.

The surviving leaves preserve the scale of the manuscript, its music, decoration, sequence and physical construction. The frontispiece preserved elsewhere gives its date and institutional context. Auction and collection records show how individual pieces travelled after the manuscript was broken apart. Comparative study reconnects the decoration with the artistic world in which it was created. Taken together, these fragments allow a lost object to begin to reassemble intellectually even if it can never be physically reunited.

There is still more to discover. How many leaves survive? Where exactly was the manuscript written - for Poznań, yes, but also made there? A strong contender is Kraków. Was Derey responsible for the whole volume or working with other members of a Dominican workshop? When did the Kyriale leave Poznań? When and where was it dismantled? And might more fragments still sit unidentified in collections in Europe or America? Those questions remain open. But one thing now seems much clearer.

A monumental choirbook made for the Poznań Dominicans in 1632, dispersed and scattered across the international market, can be placed within the immediate artistic world of Błażej Derey. It was produced at precisely the moment when Derey was creating some of his most important surviving manuscripts in Poznań, and when the city's Dominican community was commissioning one of the great monumental works of Polish Baroque painting.

Nearly four centuries later, one enormous sheet of parchment, its music, its interlace and one very small dolphin have helped give the book back its identity. It was a great joy to be able to reconstruct the Polish identity of this important lost manuscript produced during the height of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the transition period between Sigismund III and Władysław IV.