VizualBusiness: Paris Hours

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Paris Hours

Paris Hours: Parchment leaves from a 15th century Book of Hours (use of Paris), encompassing: "[f]ifteen large miniatures, usually above 3 lines of text in arched compartments, surrounded by full borders of blue and gold acanthus, flowers, green pears, strawberries, and a particularly large number of grotesques, frequently obscene." [Ed. I think the name, 'drolleries', is probably closer to the mark]

"For three hundred years, from c. 1250 to c. 1550, the Book of Hours was the bestseller of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The core of the Book of Hours is the Office of the Virgin Mary, with its set of prayers to be recited at home eight different times, or hours, of the day, just as monks chanted the office during the eight monastic hours. Books of Hours still exist on the market in greater number than any other type of medieval manuscript.

Books of Hours are remarkably varied. Everyday versions were sometimes written on paper with modest ornamentation. Deluxe versions were nearly always copied on fine parchment and richly illuminated with precious gold leaf and lapis lazuli by the best artists of the day. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, doctors, lawyers, merchants, housewives, and even children, who learned to read from them, owned Books of Hours. Wealthy women often received illuminated Books of Hours as dowry presents. Recording in them milestones of family history, they passed them down from generation to generation as heirlooms."

[The Book of Hours website of Les Enluminures]

God the Father with symbols of the four Evangelists in the corners

Annunciation

Visitation; in the lower margin, soldier with arms of Malet de Graville

15th c. illuminated manuscript biblical miniature

Betrayal in the garden

religious miniature from Christian Evangelist manuscript

Pentecost

manuscript miniature of Jesus' birth biblical episode

Nativity

painted biblical manuscript miniature: the Annunciation

Annunciation to the shepherds

stable scene from New Testament : manuscript painting

Adoration of the Magi

Flight into Egypt

manuscript scene from devotional to the Virgin Mary

Assumption of the Virgin

painted manuscript scene of Goliath from Old Testament

David killing Goliath

illuminated miniature with foliated border drolleries

Job on the dunghill*

Gnadenstuhl

(Gnadenstuhl translates from the German Lutheran bible as The Mercy Seat: Christian iconography representing the Holy Trinity: God the Father holds Jesus on the cross, while the dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit hovers over it)

The elegant illuminated manuscript featured here is thought to have been produced in France in ~1480 for a member of the family of Malet de Graville [W]. Only the first image up top has been cropped back (slightly) from the full page display; the images are otherwise unaltered.