The Hours of Queen Claude de France Summary
The Hours of Claude of France is a unique gem of book art between Renaissance and Mannerism.
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The Hours of Queen Claude of France (1499-1524), which was bound with inserted protective paper leaves in the early nineteenth century, has now been rebound in a gold enamel and jewelled book cover made in Prague under the reign of Emperor Rudolph II. Sophisticated enamel medallions commemorate Christmas Night and Easter on the upper and lower cover and the Redemption in four compartments with the Arma Christi on the spine. The binding is a rare and precious example of goldsmith’s art flourishing first in Augsburg and Munich in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and triumphant at the Imperial court of Prague. It includes exquisite deep-cut enamels, a practice first developed by David Altenstetter (1547-1617) in Augsburg, before the goldsmith started to work in Prague at the court of Rudolph II. As far as we know, Altenstetter always used a silver ground for his enamelled works, so he cannot be identified with the creator of this binding. But others, like the ingenious Hans Vermeyen of Antwerp, also worked at the court of Rudolph II. Still, the creator of this precious gem set with fifty-six diamonds ultimately has to remain anonymous, since the work is unmarked, following a common practise adopted for courtly commissions. The only work appropriate for comparison is a golden binding without images but crafted in the same technique (Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI, no. 68), which was first made for Catholic use but was reworked by the same goldsmith in a horizontal format to fit a manuscript of the Twelve Meals of Jesus, with Bible excerpts from Luther’s translation. This modification was thus supposedly undertaken in Prague during the reign of the Winter King, Frederick of the Palatinate, in 1619/20; on the other hand, the binding, which now adorns the Hours of Claude of France, was surely made in the time of Rudolph II.
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Measuring 84 by 55 millimetres, this personal Book of Hours of Queen Claude is one of those extremely miniaturised Books of Hours that had been favoured at the French court since the time of Charles VIII (died in 1498) and particularly during the time of Anne of Brittany. A prayer, which is repeated three times, intercedes for the souls of Claude’s parents, Queen Anne of Brittany (died in 1514) and King Louis XII (died in 1515). Only Queen Claude of France could have been the original owner of the manuscript, since the initial C, topped with a crown, appears on a leaf that originally showed a coat of arms with the fleur-de-lis (fol. 17/17v) that was erased by later owners.
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Whereas all miniature pages are framed with architectural Renaissance borders, the text pages including the calendar are framed with an elaborate system of references to Claude of France: motifs, which the queen adopted from her mother’s devices (the Spanish motto non mudera and the Franciscan cord) and more emblems such as Claude’s own motto in Latin and Greek, emblems of prudence (armillary sphere) and justice (ostrich feathers), as well as probable allusions to her father (wings – ailes in French – stand for the letter L) and to her mother-in-law Louise of Savoy (unknotted cord). The coloured ground of the border, lavender, can be interpreted as a reference to the amethyst and could point to the imperial ambitions of the French royal house since Charles VIII that also governed the foreign policy of Louis XII and Claude’s spouse, François Ier.
Although engravings of four calendar pages and the Assumpta of our manuscript, which was long thought to be of Italian origin, were published by Dibdin in 1817, it was not until 1975 that Charles Sterling published the Book of Hours, which was in the possession of the Rothschild family until 1968. Together with the even smaller fragment of a Book of Hours made for Claude of France known as her “prayer book” (M. 1166 at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York), it belongs to the core group of manuscripts that provide a basis for the identification of the Master of Claude of France.
The artist’s œuvre was since 1975 augmented by further attributions such as a primer for Claude’s sister Renée in Modena. Apparently, the Master of Claude of France worked together with Giovanni Todeschino and Jean Bourdichon on the Book of Hours made for King Frederick III of Aragon (Latin 1053 in Paris) before 1503. He stayed in Bourdichon’s workshop as an illuminator specialised in border decorations of various kinds and adapted Italian models imported by Todeschino, as well as the botanically orientated floral borders created by Bourdichon before 1508.
The Master of Claude of France seems to have painted his first miniatures only in the second decade of the sixteenth century. His brushwork and style contrast strongly with the style of Jean Bourdichon as well as with the style of Jean Poyer, both active in Tours, and it seems all the more likely that he trained with the Master of the della Rovere Missals (Jacques Ravauld or Ravaux?). This master would have acquainted him with Italian novelties and with the tradition of Jean Fouquet in Tours.
Sterling’s dating of our Book of Hours in the period before the coronation of Claude of France in 1517 influenced subsequent research, even if scholars have not always agreed with all of his arguments in detail. The fact that only pages with miniatures were available in reproduction distorted the evaluation of the manuscript: the distinct writing style and decoration of the Book of Hours allows a dating to the 1520s. This makes this unique manuscript the first prayer book in a minuscule format with larger line spacing that facilitated the readability of the small script considerably. In addition, the abstract concept of the borders reveals early Protestant tendencies at the French court, as Myra Orth has observed.
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Only the dating as late as the 1520s does justice to the character of the splendid calendar pictures and the pictorial decoration, which is concentrated on the essentials. At the same time, the later dating of the manuscript would allow us to connect the Master of Claude of France with a certain Eloy Tassart, who has been recently discovered in documents from the court of the queen. He was active as the court illuminator of Claude of France in 1521 and 1523. This new finding indicates a dating of our Book of Hours to the final years of the short life of Queen Claude, who already died in July 1524.
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The intellectual severity of the manuscript represents a crucial moment in the history of the prayer book: still fundamentally rooted in the late medieval tradition of Books of Hours, the manuscript made for Claude of France dismisses important elements, such as the prayers to the Virgin and the cult of saints, as well as the triumphant propensity for images, which still rules the decoration of the New York prayer book. Both the scribe and the illuminator processed different impulses from Italy, among them the ostrich feathers as a personal device of the magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici.
Our manuscript is the very point of departure for the definition of the Master of Claude of France, who might be identified with Eloy Tassart. In its new golden binding made in the imperial Prague of Rudolph II, this treasure, which combines magnificent enamel work and diamonds with ravishing book art in script, decoration and miniatures of the monthly occupations as well as the most important events of the New Testament, represents two outstanding apogees from the late phase of the handwritten book. It embodies the French Renaissance, which adopted the greatest achievements of Flemish and Italian art as its own, and is triumphantly linked to the imperial splendour on the eve of the Thirty Year’s War.
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tH e book of Hours of claude de france and H er M aster eloy tassart
A Treasure for Prayer
Whoever looks at or even has the privilege of holding the manuscript this publication is dedicated to will not believe his or her eyes; this treasure sparkles in its golden binding, set with precious stones, as if it had been made especially for the sumptuous little book it contains today. What would Reverend Dibdin have said if he ever had seen the manuscript in its present state? He knew it quite well even though he did not know about its patron; he thought it was of Italian origin and honoured it with five engraved reproductions in original size. Four reproduce calendar pages and only one other represents an ultra-catholic theme, Maria Assumpta, who is raised above the heavens to be crowned in glory.1
Yet the manuscript and its binding were not made at the same time and place – as usually is the case – but epitomise nonetheless, even whilst being separated by almost a century, the same court culture of the Northern Renaissance. In France, it flourished in an atmosphere open to Italian and Flemish influences that – in the eyes of historians over the last two centuries – led to the suppression of any true French originality. This Renaissance, slowly merging
into Mannerism and early Baroque, reached its last unforeseen peak in southern Germany and above all in Bohemian Prague during the reign of Emperor Rudolph II. The manuscript is thus a product of French culture around 1500 whilst the binding is a masterpiece of southern German craftsmanship in Bohemia around 1600.
A Lucky Coincidence
In recent times an antiquarian joined the binding and the precious book, after the original appearance of the manuscript had been altered in the nineteenth century. It is not known how the manuscript was bound when it arrived in England at an unknown date, but officious concern for its state of preservation instead damaged the book’s condition. The very small format measuring just about 84 by 61 millimetres made the 122 leaves of the most delicate parchment, which were cropped from the very beginning just along the edge of the border decoration, extremely difficult to leaf through.
This compromised the preservation of the illuminated margins and, motivated by the fear of losing the exquisite border decorations due to rubbing against the opposite pages, the book was reset and rebound with paper interleaves, placed
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between the individual leaves. The original collation was destroyed as a consequence of the rebinding the manuscript, and at the same time the aesthetic impact of the spreads, especially of the exquisite text pages with their uniquely illuminated borders, was no longer visible. Since the paper leaves were larger than the original folios, the pages of the newly bound manuscript could now be turned without touching the parchment. Despite this advantage for the handling of the book, the nineteenth-century intervention turned out to have caused more danger to the manuscript than imagined: After more than a century, the illuminations left minor stains on the paper interleaves, which, as carefully selected as they might have been, always react more receptively to manuscript paint than parchment usually tends to do. Fortunately, no major damage was caused, but the manuscript could not have been preserved in the perilous condition it was found in when it last changed owners.
In preparation of the recent rebinding by James Brockman, the original parchment components of the manuscript were separated from the rest and since the old collation was destroyed, it was advisable to add a few millimetres of parchment to the inner margins towards the gutter to ensure that the book is easy to open and its pages can be easily turned. The blue nineteenth-century stamped and gilded morocco binding and the dentelle of the endpapers as well as the paper
leaves covered with darkened adhesive and slight imprints of the metallic pigments used to paint the illuminated borders are preserved.
The codex is now covered with a very rare and precious golden binding, which ennobles the exquisite manuscript hidden within. Even if this binding was not specifically made for this particular Book of Hours, it once covered a comparable book, which is today lost or can no longer be identified. Today, an unexpected coincidence has joined an outstanding work of goldsmithery
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Hours of Claude of France: binding
that has long lost the content it was made for and a ravishingly beautiful manuscript, which fits its new shell perfectly – the decision to put both together follows a line often encountered in the history of precious books. The manuscript is today much better preserved without the paper leaves, which reacted to the precious metal colours, and its binding is no longer just a pure adornment but serves yet again its intended purpose.
Christian High Feasts and the Passion
The Adoration of the Child is emblazoned on the front cover of this sixteenth-century binding: Under the ruinous rafter of the stable in Bethlehem the Virgin Mary has bedded the naked newborn in a low plaited crib surrounded by shepherds who have gathered around the Mother of God to adore the Saviour. Magnificent blossoms are laid out around the oval medallion and reappear on the back cover, where they seem even more brilliant. There, they surround an image of Easter morning: The Saviour emerges from a grey stone casket that had served as his sarcophagus and stands triumphantly with the elevated cross banner and a flapping blue (not the usual red) mantle against the sky. Three soldiers surround the sarcophagus; one is still asleep, the second raises his shield to protect himself clumsily from the apparition and the third tries to escape to the right. The cover medallions of the binding thus
splendidly unite the two highest feasts of the Western Church.
Even the binding’s spine celebrates redemption: Diamonds are inserted in all four fields on the spine, each one marking the crossing point of elongated objects that signify the Arma Christi, the instruments of his martyrdom. The bars cross and form the shape of an X, whereas the remaining triangles are filled with elements that fit their form. This dense depiction seems almost even more astonishing than both medallions on the covers and the ornamental predisposition underlines the cultural affiliation with the illuminated borders in the newly bound manuscript. All motives can be read in a clearly intended but not fully consistent chronological order from the bottom to the top. The point of departure is the Arrest of Christ and the Judgement of Pilate: the sparkling gold of the bowl and the can he used to wash his hands in innocence are shown and above them the henchmen’s thrust weapons cross, accompanied by a scimitar. The unsewn garment of Christ fills the field above, followed by a crossed halberd and ladder together with Malchus’ lamp; an iron glove and Stephaton’s pot of vinegar are placed on the lateral edges whereas the centre is adorned with the green crown of thorns. The column of the Flagellation then crosses with the spear of Longinus; the faggots at the edges relate to the Flagellation as well as the
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scourge with three metal stars. The three dice, which were used to gamble for the garment of Christ, lie at the bottom and the three nails with which the Saviour was nailed to the cross are pinned behind the diamond. From the Chalice of Suffering to the Denial of Saint Peter the events are reflected once again; the lance with the sponge of vinegar and a cross without an inscription meet here, and the hammer forging the nails is placed in the corner to the right. The significance of the blue ribbons that fill the ground of all the fields is clear by now: those are the ropes that were uses to tie down Christ.
The binding thus follows an ancient Christian tradition that valued all traces of the Passion of the Saviour and especially the Arma Christi as divine treasures given to mankind. This view also explains the necessity to embellish not just reliquaries that almost exclusively testify of suffering and death but also the images of suffering themselves with splendorous materials. Despite their use as instruments of torture, the Arma Christi were venerated as an invaluably precious heritage and the covers of the gilded binding show the two most important events of the Good Tiding: the Incarnation of the Saviour on Christmas Eve and his Resurrection in the Easter vigil.
Prayer Books between Library and Treasury
One might ask if an object that like our gem consists of a French Book of Hours and a Bohe-
mian gold work binding did not belong to a treasury or a library. A short historical review might help for orientation: what we know today of book ownership in the late Middle Ages and early modern period is principally based on contemporary inventories. In the libraries of famous personalities, prayer books are rarely mentioned, although the inventories of Duke Jean of Berry are an outstanding exception to this rule, listing numerous Books of Hours of different sizes including the tiny book made for Jeanne d’Evreux.2
The smaller the books, the more intense the transition between treasury and manuscript production becomes. This became clear in the
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Hans Holbein: Design for a binding, London, BM
1991 Greenwich exhibition that depicted the European aspirations of the English court during the reign of Henry VIII. This modern mise-enscène did not show the few miniature books with the manuscripts except in one instance – the image of the King being the main reason – in the context of the flourishing tradition of miniature portraits. The others were assembled amongst the goldsmitheries. Hugh Tait, the connoisseur of applied arts who had already published the most important essay on these works of art, was entrusted with the description of these books.3
Girdle Books for Men
In old English sources these booklets are either called “tabletts” or “girdle books”, a term still used today. However, it is ambivalent in English, and its use is limited to the English-speaking world. It is one of the few technical terms that have not come into widespread use internationally.
The term “girdle book” leads to a certain confusion of the concrete function of such an object. Sometimes they are defined as books that can be knotted to a belt with a fine ribbon or a simple robe. Such a girdle book might look like the one Saint James Major carries with him on his pilgrimage in the painting by Hieronymus Bosch4 or as the scuffed codex in the hands of Canon Joris van der Paele whom Jan van Eyck portrayed in 1436 in his famous painting of the Virgin Mary today in Bruges. Those books are
always bound in solid cloth or some type of buckskin that overlaps the edges of the text block so that it can be bound together on its top edge and attached to the belt. Naturally, a rather small size is not suitable for such a purpose; a real girdle book always had to have some weight.
The goldsmith, of course, had nothing to do with the production of a girdle book used in this manner, unless he had the task of fabricating the belt that was to carry the book. Closures, ample chain links and even an entire belt could be made out of precious metal. Another type of book, covered in gold and silver and decorated with precious stones and enamels, is the type of girdle books favoured at the court of Henry VIII. A manuscript of this size might be reduced to just a few text passages, since it was not supposed to be attached to the belt but to fit into its pattern as a chain link so that these little books could be carried around like amulets.
The contents were all the more personalized since the little books could only include very short texts. Hence, every selection was a personal one. The smallest book of the Vatican Library, for example, only contains two short prayers to Saint Anne and Saint Francis of Assisi. They were apparently assembled because a hitherto unidentified couple, Anne and François, commissioned the little volume measuring just 39 by 29 millimetres.5 After the institution of
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the Anglican Church under Henry VIII, several contents of the Roman rite were abolished and it might have been a demonstration of loyalty to the king that one of these books was decorated with a portrait of Henry VIII.6 It is the king’s portrait that endowed the Croke Girdle Book, today in the British Library, with apotropaic powers. It is one of the small books that was intended to be carried as an amulet. In spite of its small size, it is more likely to have belonged to a man than a woman. These extreme miniaturisations of girdle books allowed men to carry them into battle and always keep their prayers and images close at hand when they could not travel with complete prayer books.
A binding with embedded enamels from the period around 1540 also points towards a male possessor since the selected scenes from the Old Testament were not very suitable for a female owner. The original book however was replaced by texts printed in 1574.7 The strongly miniatur-
ised images on the covers – the Brazen Serpent depicted on the front cover and the Judgement of Salomon on the back cover – copy illustrations of the English Bible printed in either 1539 or 1540; the whole binding may reasonably be attributed to Hans of Antwerp.8
Another fully preserved Book of Hours in Chantilly is still bound in its original gilded filigree binding. It was formerly known as the Morosini Book of Hours and is today named after the delle Torre or Torriani family, without decisive proof that the book was really made for a member of this noble Milanese family.9 The binding’s gilded silver plates measure 82 by 61 millimetres and on each cover, four angel heads are placed around the small reliefs of Saint Catherine and Saint Lucy. Two enamel plates inside the book’s cover show the Kiss of Judas and the Carrying of the Cross. The miniatures themselves are closely connected to the ducal court in Milan and are attributed to the workshop of Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis.
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London, BL, Stowe 956
London, BL, Stowe 956
The illumination is contemporary with the binding, thought to have made around 1490.
Another seemingly complete Book of Hours in a far smaller format, which resembles the layout of the English girdle books, was doubtlessly destined for Charles VIII of France, who is believed to have received it as a gift from the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro.10 The remarkable Lombard painter Pietro Birago, who also started working on the miniatures of the Book of Hours of Bona Sforza in London that was later finished by Gerard Horenbout for Margaret of Austria,11 might have been its illuminator.
The commission was probably related to the war plans of Charles VIII, who, in 1494, pretended to go on a crusade in order to pursue his interests in the conflict for French supremacy in Italy. The full-page miniature on fol. 198v shows Christ himself handing over the fleur-de-lis together with the cross banner that shows not an abstract sign but a representation of the incarnated crucifix to the kneeling king. The accompanying prayer intercedes for heavenly support in the battle against the enemies (ad superandos hostes in bello) in Charles’ name whilst Charlemagne is glorified as the true predecessor. The book is of an exceeding richness of ideas; the Annunciation, for example, accompanied by choirs of angels, faces a depiction of Adam and Eve, who, as the sinful progenitors, pray for incarnation
and salvation in the miniature on the opposing page with the Incipit.
Unfortunately, the original binding was replaced in the seventeenth century12 but the key element in its association with the courtly milieu is not the fact that this book was without a doubt made for a man but the time it was made in. The Duke of Milan would have only commissioned such a splendid book for the French king with reference to Charles’ planned crusade if he himself feared the French intervention in his territories on the eve of the Italian adventure of the French.
The Credo made for Emperor Charles V might be seen in the same context. Measuring just 42 by 25 millimetres, it was planned as a little gem bound in gold enamels and set with garnets.13 The military context demonstrated by the miniature showing Charles VIII in front of Christ leaves no doubt that this little treasure was to be carried along in battle, quite probably on the belt or maybe even attached to one of the chain links.
Little Treasures for Women
When the inner beauty is visualized by the precious settings that these objects were furnished with, treasures of this kind were certainly made for women. However, it cannot be always decided with absolute certitude whether these treasures were made for a man or a woman.
The most esteemed court artists often created these bindings. Even Holbein designed such
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goldsmith’s work of purely ornamental design and once adorned with the monogram T W I, as the related drawings, today conserved at the British Museum, prove. The book was probably made for Thomas Wyatt and his wife Jane Haute (married in 1537). The little ring in Holbein’s drawing shows that both the ribbon and the book, which is still preserved at the British Museum, were intended to be carried on the girdle.14
As stories tell, these precious objects were sometimes even connected with some legend; it is told that Anne Boleyn had given such a book to a lady from the house of Wyatt before she ascended the scaffold. Coincidentally, such a book was still in the possession of the Wyatt family in the nineteenth century. It was not the one designed by Holbein since it did not carry any initials.15 Such fate meets with the story that the little Book of Hours today in the possession of the duke of Württemberg in Abtshausen once passed the hands of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. This manuscript, one of the smallest examples known, is also missing its original binding. It was beautifully rebound in the early seventeenth century and nothing of its present appearance refers to the precious shell it once had.16
A Delightful Tradition until the Era of Emperor Rudolph II
Our binding is missing the little rings and loops it would have needed to tie the unknown
book it once covered, let’s say, to a belt perhaps. Hence, the inclusion of the girdle books of the time of Henry VIII can just be understood as a short excursion in our discussion for a better understanding of such small works. Still, the few examples that are still preserved today either as originals or as designs such as in Holbein’s drawings offer astonishing parallels to our example. Both convey the venerable tradition of binding religious books in gold and precious stones. It stems from the old habit of covering Gospel books, missals and other liturgical manuscripts with valuable materials in a manner that is adopted here from the previously preferred large format to the extreme miniaturisation of the prayer book.
Intermediate forms can be found in the superb 16o Books of Hours in Florence and Munich made around 1485 in Florence for the daughters of Lorenzo de’ Medici and bound in magnificent metal bindings. One of these also covers the famous Ghislieri Book of Hours made in Bologna.17 Goldsmiths’ bindings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were already extremely rare at the time. We might also mention the Lombard Book of Hours from our catalogue, which was illuminated around the middle of the fifteenth century and later covered by a most likely Venetian binding at the turn of the century. The text block was unfortunately cut at the edges on
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behalf of its new owner to fit into the precious cover.18 In the year 1532 an enamel binding was made for a Book of Hours of northern French origin, which had been acquired by Alfred Rothschild in 1862 and is now in a private collection.19 Only a few selected artists manufactured these treasures and, as we already mentioned, even Holbein was commissioned to furnish designs for such a purpose. Especially in England, artists such as Hans of Antwerp who previously worked in his hometown were ordered to the court to create their masterly designs. In Paris, the outstanding centre of goldsmithery throughout the Middle Ages that was troubled by civil war and political instability in the period around 1400, such tremendous works as the Goldenes Rössl of Altötting came into the world.20 By the sixteenth century, other centres emerged, among them Munich. Here, a virtuous art of goldsmithing had developed already in the mid-sixteenth century; its impact also characterises the refined work of our binding. Originally working at the court of the Wittelsbach, the craftsmen later moved to Prague to work there on behalf of Emperor Rudolph II around 1600.
A Unique Binding from Prague around 1600
The magnificent treatment of the Christian high feasts on both cover plates – Christmas and Easter – joined together with the instruments of the Passion of Christ on the spine is exceeded by
the masterly design and the priceless quality of execution. The spine of the cover imitates five raised bands and the repoussé work even tries to imitate, in subtle niello, the bookbinder’s stitches.
The mere weight of the golden covers requires hinges to connect them to the spine. Both joints are connected with a semi-circle that is horizontally aligned over the spine of the text block. The cover edges are framed with a niello border and the medallions emerge in a gentle curving from the flat surface of the cover panels. The translucent enamels, especially those of the larger blossoms, develop a surprisingly dynamic volume that animates the relief of the surface. This lively play of materials is perfected by the metal cornerpieces decorated with square-cut diamonds. Both cover frames are jewelled with 20 diamonds each. Four larger diamonds in each corner-piece that are arranged in a circular form around the centre medallions accompany them and slightly smaller square-cut diamonds are inserted in the four corner-pieces of the back cover. The same patterns of arrangement are followed by the diamonds in two different sizes that adorn the headbands and the two jewels on the clasp. No less than 56 sparkling diamonds attest to the exceptional complexity of this astonishing work of art. It should be added that comparable bindings mentioned still to be mentioned were all made of gilded silver whereas our example consists of pure gold.
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Our binding does not carry one of the usual marks. It is, as specialists call it, unmarked –which means that must have been a courtly commission.21 On the other hand, the high status of the binding does not allow us to ascertain which workshop produced it. But if we compare its enchanting beauty to other contemporary works, it is easy to discern that it was certainly crafted by an unsurpassable master. It reminds us that, in 1570, the goldsmith David Altenstetter came from Cologne to Augsburg to establish his workshop in that famous Swabian city before he left for Prague in 1610 to spend the last seven years of his life as the imperial court jeweller. The family altar of the Bavarian duke Albrecht V that he made together with Abraham I Lotter around 1573/74 and that is today conserved in the treasury of the Munich Residence already shows certain stylistic prerequisites of the same subtle ornamentation that embellishes our binding.22
One of his contemporaries was Hans Karl who worked in Nuremberg and Augsburg. Both were masters of the enamel technique that attains new heights in our binding since it surpasses the anxious need for symmetry that the more traditional contemporary goldsmiths valued as a priority of their works.
A silver binding from Nuremberg made by Hans Lencker in 1574 is comparable to our work, although its size of 150 by 95 millimetres with a depth of 30 millimetres exceeds the dimensions of our small format.23 The covers are furnished with oval medallions that show the creation of Eve on the front and the Last Judgement on the back over. The centrepieces are framed by the four evangelists in the corners on the front and with depictions of the four virtues, Fides, Spes, Caritas and Prudentia. The spine is, as is our example, decorated with repoussé work. The hallmarks of the city of Nuremberg, Lencker’s
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Twelve Meals of Christ, South Germany, 1619/20: binding
mark and the date 1574 are given beneath the raised bands. The prayer book contained within was made around 1600 or slightly later.
To depict the medallions representing Christmas Eve and Easter, the designer or responsible goldsmith surely found inspiration in contemporary works of arts, especially engravings. But his real contribution manifests itself in the impressive aesthetic effect that originates in the interaction between the function and its ornamentation. The central placement of the medallions ennobles them but truly triumphant is the sense of nature conveyed in the blossoms surrounding them and the keen understanding for abstract patterns on the fields of the spine. Although flowers and blossoms do not play an important role in the decoration of the embedded manuscript itself, one might nevertheless compare the abstract placing of the patterns to the border decorations with their numerous allusions to Christian belief as well as decisive references to the person for whom this little treasure was made at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
And Yet Another Happy Coincidence
Whoever wanders through images of the past should not be tempted to believe in absolute uniqueness. It might seem disappointing at first that none of the books displaying a general overview of goldsmiths’ work mentions a second binding comparable to ours, but then, what a
surprising coincidence! In 1993/94, I described a booklet in the catalogue Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI for the antiquarian book dealer Heribert Tenschert that corresponds astonishingly well to our binding, although the content of the book itself does not have much to do with the things that concern us here.24
It is an anonymous text called “Vonn Miniatur gemahltes Büchlein die 12 malzeitten Christi sampt der Schriefft” (Little booklet painted by hand containing the Twelve Meals of Christ and the Scripture). A protestant compiler selected corresponding texts from Luther’s translation of the New Testament that were copied by hand and accompanied by twelve coloured pen drawings preceded by a sumptuously decorated title page. Where this manuscript was made cannot be decided with certitude. I thought of the free imperial city of Augsburg back then, where the tolerant governance allowed local artists to accept works of both confessional contents.
Apart from its horizontal format measuring 41 by 51 millimetres, the design of the gold binding is closely related to the present item. The raised bands of the spine are covered with grooved repoussé work. The clasp is attached to the cover with comparable semi-circled enamel bosses that are shaped like slightly notched blossoms in this example. Whilst the text – as the title already includes – is conceived in conjunction with the
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associated pen drawings, the binding is of a purely ornamental appearance. Magnificent flowers are laid around the centrepieces in a somewhat asymmetrical arrangement that creates an overall perfect effect. This time, the medallions are not shown with the crowned Jesus monogram IHS (however common with the Jesuits and acceptable for Protestant use) above three nails on the front and the pentagram of the Hebraic name of God on the back cover.
In 1993 I still missed the point that the final use of this binding could be the consequence of a rededication. Although the spine of the book and the clasp work perfectly well, the letters of the monogram should stand upright but instead are rotated ninety degrees. This particular arrange-
ment would not be surprising if one considers the possibility that the cover plates were originally made for a booklet of the more common vertical format. Not until then was the responsible goldsmith commissioned to adapt the cover plates to the horizontal format of the Twelve Meals of Christ. Thus, the panels were turned around ninety degrees and the hinges for the spine were fixed to the former bottom edge of the plates. Yet again we reach a point where such an exceptionally precious work of art did not retain its originally intended appearance.
But this is not the right place to speculate on possible reasons for the subsequent rearrangement. If the attribution to a workshop active in Prague is accepted, it would meet a conclu-
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New York, PML, M.1166
sive historical point: after the death of Emperor
Rudolph II in 1612 and the quickly subsequent death of his successor Matthew in 1619, the state of Bohemia passed to the protestant Elector Palatine Frederick V in the winter of 1619/20 who encouraged iconoclastic riots in Prague during his short regiment. During this time, the already finished binding with the IHS monogram and the pentagram might have been passed onto a new possessor, this time a follower of the Protestant belief who used it to cover a manuscript based on the Lutheran version of the Bible.
This proposal remains a hypothesis that however allows us to also delineate the stylistic relationship of the two goldsmith bindings and to retrace their sequence of origin more concretely. Defining works such as the family altar of Duke Albrecht I made in Augsburg and dated 1573/74 as the stylistic premise, the gold binding of our Book of Hours could be a work from Prague during the time of Altenstetter’s activity at the court of Rudolph II dating from the time shortly after 1600. Other works from the emperor’s treasury would confirm this thesis.25 However, the closest stylistic affinity is found in a table clock made by David Altenstetter in Augsburg, today conserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.26
Slight compositional differences and the new freedom and opulence of the floral designs should place our binding in the period
of the last flowering of goldsmithery under the reign of Rudolph II. The second golden binding, the one later turned around ninety degrees to fit the Lutheran text of the Twelve Meals of Christ, must then have been reworked by the same goldsmith who initially prepared the cover plates for a booklet in a common vertical format because the spine and the clasp are worked in the same technique and style – in an rearrangement which must have taken place in the winter of 1619/20!
A Book Made for Claude of France
Whoever wants to learn about the prayer books of women of the high nobility at the dawn of the early modern age might assume that the exuberantly growing literature in historical gender studies offered some new and enlightening material on this subject. After the passing of Myra Orth and Janet Backhouse, more recent literature on this topic however tends to neglect the Books of Hours and prayer books made for noble ladies; they take so much pride in focussing on or astonish with a lack of knowledge on this topic, even if the title might pretend otherwise.27 In a research that is only focused on words, it is often the only aim to find passages explicitly written for the heroine of such a study. However, sacrificing the books used for daily prayer shows at the same time a disdain that contests the historical value of these manuscripts. Maybe modern authors might occasionally fear the consequences of their hero-
25
ines and spiritual sisters still having been raised to turn daily to their books of prayer.28
One often reads that prayer books were personalised in several ways, after the wishes of their patrons. Although the text had to be rewritten by hand every time and thus allowed numerous changes to include personalised passages, examples of Books of Hours that include personalised prayers or even modify certain passages in the common section in a way that would truly personalise them are very rare. The traditional prayer texts were apparently so fundamental and
dear to the patrons of these books that even slight modifications of the known forms are almost never found.
Remembrance of the Parents in the Office of the Dead and the Penitential Psalms
It is all the more surprising that the most important reference to the first owner of our manuscript can be found in an altered text. The third-tolast prayer in the Book of Hours starting on fol. 119 is, as John Kebabian already noticed in his description for the antiquarian book dealer H. P. Kraus in 1974,29 extended with a personal dedi-
26
fol. 43v-44: birth of Christ with coat of arms erased
fol. 94v-95: prayer for the parents
cation: “Inclina domine aurem tua(m) ad preces nostras quibus misericordiam tuam supplices
deprecamur, vt animam famuli tui Ludovici
Regis patris mei: et animam famulæ tuæ Annæ
Reginæ matris meæ: et animas omnium fidelium
defunctorum, quas de hoc seculo migrare iussisti: in pacis ac lucis regione constituas et sanctorum tuorum iubeas esse consortes.”30
This concrete personalisation is found in one of the final prayers of the Office of the Dead that usually just mentions more generally the souls of all pious deceased. In several instances it is used twice to commemorate a single soul in
the beginning that merits a particularly intense remembrance without calling the deceased by name and in a second reiteration then remembers the souls of all deceased.31 In the royal Books of Hours made in Tours this prayer rivals with another tradition represented by the chief works of Jean Bourdichon, such as the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany and the Books of Hours for Charles VIII and Frederick III of Aragon.32 In a row of three prayers at the end of the Office of the Dead, the second one is most commonly “Deus venie largitor et humane salutis amator quesumus clementiam tuam ut nostre congrega-
27
tionis fratres sorores propinquos et benefactores nostros: qui ex hoc seculo transierunt beata maria semper virgine intercedente cum omnibus sanctis tuis ad perpetue beatitudinis consortium pervenire concedas.”33
What earlier literature on this manuscript did not notice is the fact that this personalised prayer is not just cited at the end of the Office of the Dead. The final prayers at the end of Vespers and Lauds of the Office of the Dead repeat the
same wording; therefore it appears already on fol. 95. The personalised text has been used again a third time in a setting that is more unusual for commemorative prayers: The text block of the Penitential Psalms and the Litany ends with the same prayer on fol. 89, followed by the prayer Deus venite largitor and the Fidelium omnium conditor.
Since all three transcripts of the prayer Inclina aurem tuam on fols. 89, 95 and 119 explicitly mention the father and the mother by name, there is no doubt that our Book of Hours was written solely for one of the surviving children of King Louis XII of France and Queen Anne of Brittany. Only the two daughters that survived the royal couple come into question as the owners of our manuscript: Claude (1499-1524)34 and Renée (1510-1575).35 A noble gilded and crowned C proves that only the older Claude can have been the original owner of the manuscript; it appears in the text border on fol. 17 and does not mark one of the important beginnings of the text. It is also traced on the verso of this page as a result of simplifying the working process, which was a common practise in manuscript illumination. The placement of such a C on this text page of minor importance might be explained by the text itself: a two-line initial C appears for the first time on fol. 17 and it might have been the association with the initial of the name of the princess that motivated the heraldic C in the border.
28
Modena, Bibl. Estense a .U.2.28 = Lat. 614
One searches on vain for comparable deliberately placed letter Rs that would have pointed to Claude’s sister.
Only one further manuscript we know of today repeats the exact wording of the personalised prayer for Louis XII and Anne of Brittany. It is a manuscript that certainly belonged to Renée of France and repeats the prayer on fol. 16-16v.
This pious Primer was apparently composed for the little princess when she was a child.36 It seems very likely that she took it to Ferrara on the occasion of her marriage to Ercole II d’Este, which is why the book is today conserved at the fol. 16v-17: crowned letter C and coat of arms erased in the border
Estense library in Modena.37 In this manuscript, the prayer Inclina aurem tuam is even more rigorously separated from its original context than it is by being inserted at the end of the Litany in our Book of Hours. Without the two accompanying prayers at the end of the Office of the Dead, it is placed in the primer of Renée of France at the end of the gospel reading of Saint John, which has been treated as if it were a suffrage with a versicle, a responsory and the prayer Protector in te sperantium added. This reutilisation of a prayer for the commemoration of the parental souls in a book without an Office of the Dead does not
29
necessarily prove the primacy of our Book of Hours over the manuscript in Modena, and the relation between the two remains unsolved.
The Office of the Dead was prayed for the commemoration of the Dead and the intercession on their behalf. It is thus not surprising to find the names of parents who among the deceased were the first to be commemorated. In some Offices of the Dead, among a variable succession of prayers, one sometimes finds an intercession prayer for the forgiveness of parental sins: “Deus qui nos patrem et matrem honorare precipisti miserere clementer animabus patris et matris mee eorumq(ue) p(e)c(ca)ta dimitte. meq(ue) cum illis in eterne claritatis gaudio fac videre”38 as it is written in Berry’s Très Riches Heures on fol. 107.39
Closer to the period that concerns us here is the Guémadeuc Book of Hours that I published in a facsimile edition in 2000 with an accompanying commentary volume. The wording of the prayer includes a formulation that demands a concrete name. We read on fol. 94v: “animam famuli tui. N. et animas omnium fidelium defunctorum …”, followed by the prayer Deus qui nos patrem et matrem that was just mentioned but not copied in the Book of Hours for Claude of France.
The proximity of the prayers in both manuscripts cannot be explained by mere proximity of creation since the Guémadeuc Book of Hours was quite probably planned for Anne of Brittany herself
before it was given to a lady of the queen’s Breton entourage.40 Personalised prayers that might even include names are, as we already mentioned, very rare and it is all the more astonishing that it was common at the court of the Breton dukes to insert even entire texts that commemorated the outstanding position of the duke or the duchess in their Books of Hours: Pierre II, for example, prays in his hours for God’s intervention in the governance of his duchy,41 whereas Francis II and Marguerite of Foix pray for the conception of a heir in her London Book of Hours, just before the duchess finally conceived Anne of Brittany, who was later to become the queen of France.42
Elements of Personalisation of Book of Hours at the Court of Anne of Brittany
Personalisation of Books of Hours at the court of Anne of Brittany could be achieved by very different means. The only known examples, however, that include a modification of the standardised texts are those made for Claude and Renée. The inclusion of the names of their deceased parents makes our Book of Hours as well as the primer in Modena rare exceptions in the history of French prayer books. Portraits of the noblemen and women for whom these books were made are rarely found, one exception being Anne of Brittany’s portrait in the opening diptych of her Grandes Heures painted by Jean Bourdichon between 1503 and 1507.43
30
The two miniatures in the primer of Claude of France made in the early sixteenth century are like an amusing game of deception between Anne and her daughter Claude.44 Two full-page paintings showing the alliance coat of arms of Anne, consisting of Brittany and France, frame the text. The supplicant with the A of the queen’s name on the cloth of her prie-dieu kneels in the opening miniature, whilst the differently dressed daughter accompanied by the initial C is shown in the last miniature. Saint Anne accompanies the queen; Saint Claude assists her daughter. Although both appear to be of the same age, there can be now doubt that the artist meant to designate the mother and her daughter.
The mother and her child had been painted in another primer about ten years earlier; its borders vary with a sublime diversity the queen’s name, written in just three letters, ANE. Anne of Brittany commissioned Jean Poyer to illuminate this booklet for her son Charles-Orland (1492-1495), who died at a very young age. On fol. 10v, the queen is shown in confession, whilst the dauphin himself is kneeling in a dimmed room in front of an empty throne in the last miniature of the little book. He is depicted as a twelve-year-old, an age that he never reached, praying a highly unusual suffrage that intercedes for the seat of wisdom. He is thinking about his mother and himself when the text says: “… servus tuus sum. et filius ancille tue.”45
Anne of Brittany on the other hand did not commission the prayer book in Modena. That it was indeed intended for a girl is proven by the five miniatures showing a young female supplicant. Claude as well as Renée could be considered as its patrons because there is no concrete evidence pointing clearly to either one of the sisters. The history of the manuscript itself tells us the answer: It was Renée of France, married to a member of the Este family, who brought her own book, not one of her sister’s books, to Italy.
The miniatures of fol. 4, 4v, 5v and 10 show a girl or young lady in a rather unusual condition for prayer: as in the primer of Charles-Orland, she seems to be shown at an ideal age of youth that is comprehensible even if it does not betray a character of concrete likeness. The depiction of a prayer in front of the altar can be understood as a genre-like scene, as well as the confession in front of a bishop and the two mystical conversations with Christ. Along with these encounters, the young lady appears to visit the Lord in a church, so that he might teach her the right ways (fol. 5v). Another time, Christ appears to her in a radiant gloriole in her oratory. Already Margaret of York was represented like this in an impressive miniature in the London Add. Ms. 7970 that contains the Dialogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ, written by Nicolas Finet around 1470.46 The garments of the four figures in the Modena manuscript speak of high nobility; heraldic
31
devices are missing. In one of the miniatures on fol. 5v the physiognomy seems more individualised and the childlike features with the adorably chubby cheeks are found in yet another miniature: they characterise the physiognomy in the half-length portrait of the supplicant on fol. 2 in a somewhat larger format. It is quite probable that the artist really tried to portray the little princess here the way she looked when the book was made for her. It is clear that we stand at the dawn of the children portraits of the Renaissance that were
later to become a fashionable art in miniature format at the court of Henry VIII of England, painted by members of the Flemish Horenbout family and Holbein.
Since the portrait iconography of Claude of France does not offer reliable information and no other portrait of Princess Renée from her childhood is known, the quest for the identity of the little supplicant might lead to a new consideration: Instead of assuming carelessness of the illuminator on fol. 4, 4v and 10, we
32
Modena, Bibl. Estense a .U.2.28 = Lat. 614
Modena, Bibl. Estense a .U.2.28 = Lat. 614
could suppose that – in analogy to the New York Primer of Charles-Orland – the artist showed the patron and the child for whom the book was intended. If this was so, then Claude of France, who apparently commissioned the primer for her still underage sister Renée, would have had her likeness in prayer painted on fol. 4v, exactly as her mother did in 1495, whilst the princess who was to use the primer, was portrayed after life in a half-length portrait on fol. 2 and again in prayer for the guidance of Christ on fol. 5v.
Confronted with such vague assignments, it is not surprising that even the Books of Hours made for Anne of Brittany herself offer sparse evidence of their destination. This is true both for her Très Petites Heures in Paris47 and her Petites Heures,48 as well as for a little Book of Hours from the castle at Nantes, which is today inventoried as the Heures d’Anne de Bretagne at the municipal library.49
The Très Petites Heures, which for Nicole Reynaud
33
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam, 159
and her French colleagues are the key manuscript to define the artist’s personality whom I call in agreement with Ina Nettekoven the Master of the Rose Window of the Sainte Chapelle, shows just one alliance coat of arms of Anne of Brittany held by two angels in the lower margin on fol. 40v. The only heraldic device in this book is not painted on a page carrying a major Incipit but accompanies Lauds of the Office of the Virgin. Since a miniature of the Visitation precedes this passage showing two pregnant women, Charles Sterling constructed on this ground a conclusive historical explanation:50 Anne of Brittany paid just one extended visit to Paris, from May until August 1498, after the sudden death of Charles VIII. It was during these months that she might have commissioned the very small Book of Hours. It was not her only Book of Hours made in a Parisian workshop, but probably the first she commissioned there. It was then only after her second marriage to Louis XII that the alliance coat of arms would have been inserted on the Visitation page to emphasise the royal couple’s urgent need of an heir. The birth of a male successor did not follow, but the couple was blessed with the birth of Princess Claude of France in 1499. This Book of Hours is without a doubt one of the earliest testimonies of the cult of Saint Claude at the royal court; it might even be the earliest. The newborn princess received the very uncommon female name of Claude to
honour the saint, most likely out of gratitude, after Anne had went on a pilgrimage to SaintClaude in the Jura Mountains shortly after her wedding.
In the Petites Heures painted by the Petrarch Master, whom I believe to be Jean Pichore of Paris,51 a portrait of King Louis XII is sometimes considered in the depiction of Saint Louis who prepares a meal.52 Some borders are decorated with the name ANNE, occasionally reduced to its last letters NE, together with the heraldic ermine of the Breton ducal house. The cult of Saint Anne flourished during these years53 and the saint is venerated in the calendar, the Litany and the suffrages. Although the quality of the illuminations is worthy of a royal manuscript, Avril believed in 1993 that the traditional identification of the owner with the queen is not at all mandatory.54
In the case of the small Book of Hours from the Castle of Nantes (measuring 120 by 80 millimetres), the provenance of the manuscript that carries the reoccurring Initial A with a Franciscan cord reinforces the assumption that is was indeed made for the queen, because Anne’s most important device was the Franciscan cord. The Parisian origin of the manuscript, which is one of the better works of the so-called Master François but almost never mentioned in the literature, proves at the same time that several Books
34
of Hours, including the Très Petites Heures, were made in Paris for Anne of Brittany.
On the other hand, the curious case of the Laing manuscript in the University Library of Edinburgh cannot be fully explored here: fol. 1 is emblazoned with the alliance coat of arms of Anne of Brittany.55 But this Book of Hours is made for the use of Toul, something that is not really suitable for a queen from Brittany who only resided in the Touraine and in Lyons. There is no ample evidence in favour of a royal destination of the prayer books made for Anne of Brittany and her children. This lead me to assume in 2001, that the Guémadeuc Book of Hours,56 with its emphasis of Saint Anne and Saint Claude, was probably commissioned by Anne of Brittany in Lyons, although she probably never used it but quickly passed in on to a Breton lady of her entourage.
The complex history leading to the identification of the court painter Jean Bourdichon on the basis of Anne’s Grandes Heures with her portrait, coat of arms and monogram does not need to be retold here. Only the rather small primer made for Charles-Orland (Morgan 50) and the large primer of Claude of France (Fitzwilliam 159) are marked by comparable signs of destination: they also bear portraits, names and other heraldic devices.
Miniature Formats for Kings and Queens
One further distinct characteristic of our Book of Hours that shows the destination for the children of Anne of Brittany in its textual modifications can be interpreted as an indirect clue to its original ownership: the miniature format. Of course, Jean Bourdichon illuminated the magnificent book justly called the Grandes Heures for Anne of Brittany, but usually the small format was preferred. The same preference also leads to the little book today in the possession of the ducal family of Württemberg, the devotional tradition of which can be traced back to Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots.57
This tradition of Books of Hours in a rather small format at the French royal court dates back, as we already indicated, at least to the time of Charles VIII. A further manuscript measures 70 by 50 millimetres and is adorned with the royal coat of arms, the device plus qu’autre and the name of Anne of Brittany’s first husband charles viii in Gothic book script.58 The borders are filled with fleur-de-lis and the crowned K of Charles’ name in a decorative pattern that was already used in the rose window of Sainte Chapelle in Paris. The book also contains a prayer to Saint Claude, although it was added to the original manuscript a bit later. The little book might be connected with a notice by Philippe de Commines, who mentions that the king called for the sacred assistance of the saint from the Jura region: “Que
35
Monseigneur saint Claude me soit en ayde.” The manuscript, today in a private collection, was made not at the Loire but in Paris, in the milieu of early printing that Charles VIII promoted more than any other regent. The miniatures were most likely painted by the Paris Master of the Chronique scandaleuse. His style allows a rather late dating of the book just before the king’s death in 1498.
The Miniaturisation of Script
The Hours of Charles VIII just mentioned measure 49 by 31 millimetres.59 Our manuscript is organised with the same width but with
a height of 60 millimetres; it is more elongated than the Italian codex. This is not the place to relate the history of the miniaturisation of Books of Hours that had already begun in the fourteenth century.60 A rather rectangular script that we call Gotico-Antiqua or Fere-Humanistica, which is easy to read with healthy eyes, was chosen for the king who died in 1498. This type was already used in printing in the 1460s whilst a proper Antiqua or Roman type was first used in later books.61 This epochal difference cannot be emphasised enough: it meant an incisive adjustment for the scribe who did not change between
36
fol. 17v-18: crowned letter C and coat of arms erased in the border
thin and thick lines anymore but had to hold the quill in a steady angle to achieve a unified appearance of lines of constant fineness.
The manuscript for Charles VIII, from Paris, is written in 14 lines, whilst the Book of Hours made for Claude of France, which included the commemoration of her father, Louis XII, who died in 1515, follows a new aesthetic conception of the page layout, which tends to place far more lines of written text on one page. It is thus ruled for twenty-two lines per page, and its text is written in a far smaller Antiqua, or Roman script. The minute size of our book is nevertheless surpassed by a second manuscript once owned by Claude of France: Morgan 1166 exclusively comprises texts that belong to the standard equipment of Books of Hours but the substantial offices and hours are lacking. It is thus merely fifty-four leaves thick. The edges of the book block were trimmed more rigorously than our codex; it now measures just 69 by 49 millimetres with a justification of 46 by 27 millimetres.62
With twenty-one lines and a justification width just slightly (1 millimetre) smaller than the one of our manuscript, the New York prayer book fits extremely well into the picture: The line spacing in the prayer book is much more narrow, which is why the entire justification is about 10 millimetres shorter than in our manuscript. Apart
form these two examples, only the so-called Book of Hours of Mary Stuart, probably also made for a member of the French royal family amply falls below these miniaturised dimensions: With a width of 21 millimetres and twenty-one lines of written text, it is almost the same height (48 millimetres) as the prayer book of Claude of France in New York.63
Parental and Novercal Heraldry in the Margins Destined for Claude of France
So far, the exceedingly rich border decorations that adorn our Book of Hours of Claude of France has only briefly been mentioned. Regrettably, the two coats of arms on fol. 17 and 17v and on fol. 44 were erased at an unknown date. However, the basic colours of blue and silver match Claude’s known heraldry perfectly: although as a woman she did not bring the claim to the throne into her marriage with Francis of Angoulême, she was nonetheless the heiress of the royal couple and, as the daughter of Anne of Brittany, the heiress of Brittany. For this reason we can assume that the erased arms did not represent conjugal coats of arms but originally showed France on one page and Brittany on the other. The already mentioned crowned initial C in the border would have surmounted a French royal blazon with the golden lilies on an azure ground on fol. 17 and 17v, and the blazon in the border framing the Adoration of the Child initially would have
37
fol. 20v-21: armillary sphere in the border
presented the Breton ermine on silver.
Art history, a field that is fixated on images, has no choice but to prefer the little prayer book in the Pierpont Morgan Library. There, in the border decorations, the entire creative imagination of the artists finds its expression in various motives of the history of human salvation. Our Book of Hours follows a very different aesthetic and intellectual concept. Although it refers to a more traditional kind of border decoration it puts much more emphasis on abstract signs and most of all on the word itself; and therefore it repre-
sents an epochal step in the history of prayers in books.
In 1515, Louis XII died, just two years before conflicts over the old Christian dogmas grew more acute and found their first outburst when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg and publically sparked the Reformation. France suffered from acrimonious fights in the aftermath and also the role of word and image for good Christians were discussed fervently. Claude’s Book of Hours follows the Old Catholic belief: the entire border decoration
38
is literally framed by the cord of Saint Francis of Assisi and thus by the Minorite discipline of faith. After the death of Charles VIII in 1498, Anne of Brittany founded a sisterhood of Franciscan tertiaries, women who lived a worldly life outside the monastic order. She herself was a member of this sisterhood, and Claude, too, had to join them.
Although the Franciscan ideas were clearly imbedded in the decoration of Claude’s Book of Hours, the rationality of the depiction of praying and the supplicant herself belong to a new era that already distrusted the image but still succeeded
in consolidating figuratively designed elements with the meaning of the written word. The motifs, which were used, are not just limited to traditional objects such as the recurrent chaplet, the so-called rosary, which have long belonged to the repertoire of the pious. They also make use of objects shaped by a culture of Humanism one would rather expect in the hands of a scientist than in the surrounding of a supplicant. It so happens that the Latin texts are not paired with vernacular language but with Greek and the Iberian motto non Mudera.
39
fol. 55v-56: pair of ailes in the border
All border decorations are painted on a ground coloured in violet. This colour should be associated with the amethyst, which in much earlier eras had been strictly reserved for the Byzantine emperor. They are framed by the Franciscan cord. Its threads are covered with golden and white (which signifies silver) objects. Apparently the walls of the oratories of Anne of Brittany and Claude of France were covered with such ropes in complex patterns, which one might confuse with sailor’s knots, of a more than practical meaning. Similarly decorated walls can still be found, for example, in the castle of Écouen and one of
Claude’s chambers in Blois is said to have had been covered with the same sign on yellow silk. On the calendar pages, these cords alternate with scrolls which carry the same message in three different formulations: they derive from the motto non Mudera already used by Anne of Brittany and are placed, according to their length, mostly in the inner and upper margins of the pages. It signifies the insistence on not changing oneself. This idea turns into the Latin motto of hope for eternal life, fir M itas eternitatis spe M duplicat. 64 This dictum is then translated into Greek, very often hard to decipher and written in
40
fol. 57v-58: ostrich feathers in the border
different ways, but we might deduct the following transcription: ′H ΒΕΒΑΙΩΤHΣ ΤΟΥ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΥ ΔΙΡΛΑΣΙΑΖΕΙ ΤHΝ ′ΕΛΡΙΔΑ.
The mottos in the borders call for firmness of belief that doubles the hope for eternal life. Claude’s mother had insisted on this as well as on the Franciscan cord, which signifies an intractably strong bound. Another element appears for the first time on the opening page of Matins of the Office of the Virgin on fol. 15 and underlines this context: This element is distinguished from all the other devices in the border decoration already by its strong colouring. It is the large blue initial S formed from bands of clouds. Placed between small painted stars, the queen’s old motto non Mudera written in gold letters can be read with some difficulty. The blue S reappears three times on fol. 45 and 45v accompanying Prime of the Office of the Virgin. Here it forms a sky strewn with stars and interlocked with three letters S composed of the Franciscan cord. In another instance, on fol. 24 and 24v, the ornament is composed of several interlocked letters. It can also be connected to the knotted cord, as on fol. 38v, the first text page of Matins of the Hours of the Holy Cross. The ornament is placed on the verso page of the Crucifixion and reappears in similar form on fol. 47 and 47v for the opening of Prime of the Office of the Virgin. The Old French term fermesse (firmness) can with a certain amount of fantasy be transformed into
a ferme S , a firm or closed S. The closed S appears four times on fol. 83 and 83v and again, more determinedly, on fol. 86 and 86v in the border decoration of the Litany with the major saints.
In both instances, it is made of a band of clouds gemmed with golden stars.
Since the beginning of the Office of the Virgin on fol. 15 marks one of the most important divisions of the Book of Hours, the blue letter S in the border is accompanied by yet another motive: an armillary sphere. It was already used as a personal emblem of Duke Francis II of Brittany and was inherited by his daughter Anne of Brittany. On different occasions, the armillary sphere appears throughout the pages of the entire manuscript, mostly on those pages that are already emphasised by carrying a major Incipit. The skilfully drawn instrument is often exquisitely shaded and masterly contrasted with the background. It is painted in varying sizes on different folios.
41
Ostrich feathers of Lorenzo de Medici
Particularly magnificent is its first appearance, especially because the knots of the cord are laid like beams radiating in four directions around the sphere rendered with a keen sense for illusion. The band originally intended for the zodiac sign carries the letters if M a M and in another instance the letters iiason; two inscriptions which had been “mysterious” to Charles Sterling.65 Their explanation is not all too difficult when one thinks of the course of the year. The two inscriptions quoted do not designate the sign of the zodiac but rather the initials of the months, from January to May and from June to November!
The armillary sphere itself signifies sagacity and melancholy; it surely was a conclusive sign for an intelligent but lonely woman as already Sterling had correctly observed.
The unknotted band that replaces the cords on several pages seems not to derive from Claude’s mother, Anne, but rather from her mother-inlaw, Louise of Savoy. Apparently Claude was on rather good terms with Louise, whose son Francis I was then made king of France. Roger Wieck obviously considers the rope to be a sign of Claude’s husband Francis, although already the erased coat of arms proves that the Book of Hours was made for the duchess and queen alone and does not refer anywhere else to her alliance with the king.
But Claude’s father, Louis XII, is honoured in
the border decorations of her manuscript: on fol. 56 and 56v, immediately following the depiction of the Magi currently identified as kings, three golden pairs of wings are painted in the border. Already in the time of the unfortunate dauphin Louis of Guyenne (died 1415), its French equivalent ailes was read as an L.66 The feathers that appear two folios later might refer to this association. Once brought into the game, probably because of the Adoration of the three Magi for Sext of the Office of the Virgin, this idea is repeated by two pairs of wings on the verso page of the Presentation in the Temple before it disappears from the repertoire of the border decoration.67 On the other hand, the paired wings should not be narrowed down to an exclusive reference to Claude’s father because they always appear paired. Moreover, the sign can have very different connotations that can be literally understood as winged.68
At least, the highly unusual basic colour of the entire border decoration takes on meaning when considering the pretentions of Louis XII. In 2001, his biographer Didier Le Fur described him as Un autre César and apparently, the French king dreamt about reaching for the imperial crown at the dawn of the early modern period. Charles VIII already carries it in a frontispiece of a manuscript today in the National Library in Paris69 and the fight for Italian supremacy, which
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Another very rare motive, which appears in the border decorations, is closely connected to Italy: Like the paired wings, large ostrich feathers decorate several text pages. They are turned outwards and their form with the big curved peak resembles the characteristic appearance of the feathers associated with a famous member of the Florentine Medici family: Lorenzo il Magnifico, (14491492) used such sumptuous feathers – by that time called ostrich feathers – in a bundle of three, each of a different colour. In his heraldry they are held together by a diamond ring and embody the three virtues of faith, love and hope.70 The triad is not always mandatory; two feathers, for example, suffice in a Parisian Palatina manuscript.71 After the time of Lorenzo il Magnifico, the symbol even arrived at the Vatican during the papacies of the Medici popes, Leo X (born 1475, pope 1513-1521) and Clemens VII (born 1478, pope 1523-1534). The newly commissioned frescos of the Sala dei Chiaroscuri, for example, were decorated with the Medici feathers. They even came to Urbino with the arrival of Lorenzo II de’ Medici, who died in 1521 and was the father of the later French queen Catherine de’ Medici. It was Michelangelo, who designed and erected his monument in the Medici funeral chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence between 1524 and 1533.
By that time, it was believed that ostrich feathers were of an unprecedented homogeneity, and so they could also signify justice itself. Referring to this probable allusion, the paring as a comparison makes sense.72 The ostrich feathers in the Hours of Claude of France surely take the famous heraldry of the Medici into account, aware of the fact that the ruling pope came from this influential Florentine family. Their golden accordance achieved by their paring might well embody justice. Already Charles d’Angoulême, the father of Claude’s husband Francis I who already died in 1496, had ostrich feathers painted in his book of hours, latin 1173 in Paris, fol. 25 but as a matter of fact, they are not at all as uniform as their symbolism would require them to be.
The various references to Anne of Brittany, Louise of Savoy and Claude of France fit very well into the personalised conception of the book with its prayer on fols. 89, 95 and 119 – a supplication exclusively reserved for the daughters of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII – and the letter C on fol. 17 and 17v as part of a very unique and personalised language of devices. We should remember than an art historian dealing with such a richly decorated book cannot simply unreel a lexical knowledge of contemporary heraldry, but rather needs to complete the things we know about Claude of France with a profound analysis of the little book itself. Neverdefined French politics until the time of Francis I, has to be considered in this context.
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theless there may exist a fourth little manuscript from the immediate circle of Claude and Renée: We know of the existence of a Book of Hours from the former Hachette collection, today in an Irish private collection, carrying the devise non Mudera together with the armillary spheres and paired wings as in our Book of Hours, this time on golden borders although not of the same high quality as our example.73
It should be emphasised that the ornaments are strictly limited to a woman and with the exception of the paired wings associated with Louis XII, all further motifs associated with a male possessor are omitted: there is no Orléans porcupine, the heraldic animal of Claude’s father Louis, nor the fire salamander of her husband Francis I.
Another look at the Modena prayer book highlights the historic importance of the Book of Hours of Claude of France. A comparable heraldry was not developed for Claude’s little sister, who first had to learn how to read. Since the girl was not yet a member of the Franciscan sisterhood founded by her mother, some attributes that we find in the Book of Hours made for Claude were not used in the Modena prayer book of her younger sister.74 In consequence, the Franciscan cord is missing, one of the most noticeable motifs used throughout the entire historiated border decoration in Claude’s Book of Hours.
Not even the commemoration of her father
Louis with an L or the paired wings, nor the motto non Mudera of Anne of Brittany, which still invokes Brittany’s heritage today,75 is found in Renée’s little book. Instead, it is strewn with lovely flowers such as the ones Jean Bourdichon painted for her mother; in contrast to Flemish contemporary border decoration, they are not just scattered over the margins but bloom on little branches that spring from the outer corners of the pages.
If we include the aesthetic appearance of the New York prayer book in our considerations, it seems to have been possible to choose between four different styles of border decoration. Architectural designs were reserved for head miniatures only to introduce the major Incipits. All of the manuscripts are decorated with full borders on every text page: The prayer book includes a narrative cycle, the Book of Hours includes numerous heraldic references on a light violet ground and the prayer book in Modena depicts blooming branches on a golden ground. The famous candelabrum borders, which, as we will come to learn, also belong to the repertoire of our painter, are not prominently represented in these three manuscripts.
The Miniaturised Format for Myopics?
Whoever had the chance to observe a nearsighted reader who tries to look at the Hours of Mary Stuart, especially at the opening of the
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gospel of Saint John on fol. 13v that reaches the highest point of miniaturisation, might come to find an unexpected explanation for the trend of extremely small prayer books in this period: whereas a scribe surely could have copied such a manuscript only with optical aid, it is sufficient for the reader to just take off his or her glasses to be able to decipher the extremely small script.76
Apparently, several formats were tested for Anne of Brittany’s Books of Hours: some of them were designed as impressive quarto formats, such as the queen’s Grandes Heures, but also minuscule sizes. The Très Petites Heures was long thought to be the smallest manuscript known.77 Not all of the queen’s books were such experiments of miniaturisation,78 but, of course, there was a big difference between the layout for literary texts, non-fictional literature and the readings for the prayer: Some texts might have been read, but praying itself has been a very intimate and private matter ever since, even if modern researchers sometimes tend to claim that Books of Hours were still a part of the old tradition of collective liturgical prayer.79
The search for prayer books in a very small format sometimes brings surprises to light: we know, for example, from documentary evidence that, in 1497, Anne of Brittany paid Jean Poyer 153 livres for 23 miniatures and 271 border decorations in “une petites heures … à l’usaige
de Romme”. A little leaf in the Free Library of Philadelphia showing a Pietà is today though to have once belonged to this book. The full-page miniature measures just about 85 by 55 millimetres.80 Also, Bourdichon apparently painted a book of comparable size once (85 by 60 millimetres). This hypothesis was formulated just after a leaf showing Job and his friends appeared in the Museum of Blois. It must have once belonged to such a small Book of Hours.81 Six single leaves with important miniatures of the 1520s workshop, today ascribed to Noël Bellemare, and a text block with some remaining miniatures on the art market allow the reconstruction of a Book of Hours once decorated with miniatures of 80 by 50 millimetres on leaves that were just about 113 millimetres in height.82
An even smaller Book of Hours from the same group measures 67 by 42 millimetres; it was
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Hours of Mary Queen of Scots, Abtshausen
one of the smallest books known: its measures just 37 by 23 millimetres with a writing space of 22 by 14 millimetres for 12 lines of text. The auctioneers categorized the book as a work from Tours, but the little that is deductable from the only published reproduction rather seems to point towards Paris as the place of origin. It seems more likely that the manuscript was made in the capital around 1520. The liturgical use of this book was not determined but it also includes the cord of Saint Francis, although it seems to have sunk into a pure ornamental feature.84
Once again, the size of the book block is halved in a Book of Hours sold at Sotheby’s in 1991 as
The real sensation of the small Books of Hours from the circle of Anne of Brittany is the extreme miniaturisation of their script. Their formats 32° and 64° were so small, that a book of this painted between 1528 and 1530 and consists today of only 102 leaves without an Office of the Dead. The Franciscan cord could refer to a member of the sisterhood of the Franciscan tertiaries, founded by Anne of Brittany in 1498. On the other hand, the cord is just knotted at its ends but runs for long periods without any knots. This device can be found frequently in manuscripts from the circle of Louise of Savoy. Thus again, we encounter another Book of Hours in a minuscule format made for a member of the royal court. It was even speculated that this manuscript might have once belonged to Henry II, the surviving son of Claude of France.83
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New York, PML, M. 1166
Two different aspirations thus come to light: The Lombard book made for the first husband of Anne of Brittany was intended to be taken on the crusade by its owner. It thus met the requirements of a girdle book, carried around at the belt. The symbolic relevance of the book as an amulet was far more important than its practical value as a prayer book. This is probably best expressed in the miniature showing Christ who passes the cross banner to the French king. Anne and her daughter Claude on the other hand received books that were perfectly adjusted to their daily
use for prayer, as long as one had the right – that is, myopic – eyes to read them!
Of course, we do not know whether Anne of Brittany had any problems with her eyesight and if she passed it on to her daughters. In any case, none of her portraits found in the larger manuscripts give us any clues.86 But instead of just assuming that the minuscule format of books was a playful consequence of new possibilities and experiments in the manuscript production at a time when the printing with moveable type started to revolutionise the entire production of books, it might be wise to at least include one possible alternative. Such small formats surely posed a major challenge for the scribe and it is all the more probable that these elaborate manuscripts were made for readers who could only use books of this kind conveniently in their oratories. That among all the known examples the unrivalled climax is reached in the text of the gospel reading of Saint John in the Book of Hours of Mary Stuart visualises that the extreme miniaturisation was a consequence of the importance of the word itself: no other text surpasses Saint John’s focus on the relevance of the word.
Our Hours of Claude of France show, in contrast to all the other examples, how the book artists dealt with the extreme miniaturisation of the script. Only in this manuscript we find the size, such as the Hours of Mary Stuart, could have been made out of a single double page from Berry’s Grandes Heures alone.85 The changing writing styles developed from the Gothic form with its various writing angles resulting in a constantly changing thickness of the strokes into an Antiqua or Roman script that was written in one constant stroke width. Its unified and regular appearance met the requirements of miniature books. The mere mass of text, which could be placed on the tiny pages, separates the prayer books made for women such as Anne of Brittany and her daughters Claude and Renée, from two manuscripts made for Charles VIII. With just fourteen lines of written text they are a world apart from the smaller books with their steep justification, which can accommodate twenty-one or twenty-two written lines.
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solution for a problem we encounter in Anne’s Très Petites Heures, then again in the New York prayer book of Claude of France and in the Hours of Mary Stuart. I assume that the Hours of Claude is the first example to resolve the following problem: Whereas the reader usually tends to jump between the lines due to the extremely narrow spacing, the text of the Hours of Claude of France becomes easy to read once the eyes are adjusted to the small script because the line spacing simply is more generously assessed.
If I am not mistaken, our manuscript marks the ending point of an impressive row of royal manuscripts, which – in contrast to the girdle books destined for men and of which Charles VIII also possessed one – were made for pious reading. How precious the original binding of these little books might once have been can just be estimated today by searching ancient inventories: the inventory of a lady from Touraine, for example, drawn up in 1389, describes a little Book of Hours, which later passed into the hands of Charles of Orléans, with the following words: unes petites Heures don’t les aiz sont d’or esmaillé de une annunciation et de la gésine N.D. bordées de doze balais petits, dix saphirs et quarantes perles. 87 Such detailed descriptions of precious bindings are often encountered in inventories. One of these far more rare manuscripts, the Hours of Claude of France, now sparkles in an extraordinary splendour and
unites two glorious moments of the Northern Renaissance.
The Illuminator
At the end of the Middle Ages, it was not common for book artists to sign their works. Even the most brilliant artists, who were the greatest illuminators of all time, remain anonymous and today we often have no other option than to give them eponyms like “Master of …”. If we cannot identify a work still extant with the name of an artist otherwise known by documents or mentioned in the early art literature, we have to arrange the œuvre around a piece, which can be connected to an important patron.88 When the original patrons remain unknown, later possessors are usually accepted.89 If these names, on the other hand, indicate a distracting topographical direction they can lead to considerable confusion.90
Such baptizing of anonymous artists should always consider carefully the object they are based on. This is especially true for historical names; sometimes it is not assured that a manuscript providing the name for an anonymous master was painted by his hand entirely 91 or just in parts92 . So the question is, who really was the Master of the Burgundian Prelates, if we cannot even be certain that his best work was painted by his hand or even just by a superior illuminator we are unable to define.93
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Master of Claude de France (Private collection): Annunciation
Sterling’s Definition of the Master of Claude of France
This brings us to the Master of Claude of France: In 1975 a significant coincidence in the history of antiquarian manuscripts inspired the great connoisseur of French painting Charles Sterling 94 to name an illuminator after Queen Claude of France (1499-1524) and present him as A Newly
Defined Miniaturist. The New York antiquarian
Hans P. Kraus had acquired the two minuscule manuscripts, which can, as we already signalised, be traced back to the oldest daughter of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII. Our publication is dedicated to the one manuscript that includes the prayer for the souls of Anne of Brittany and King Louis XII and offers, in the border decoration, numerous references to Claude. The second, even smaller manuscript has today found its way into the Pierpont Morgan Library (M. 1166) in New York and shows Claude’s royal coat of arms twice.95
However, Sterling only considered the little prayer book in New York to be painted by his master’s hand, assuming at the same time that this newly defined master designed our Book of Hours himself but then delegated the execution of the miniatures to a younger artist. If this assumption were true, then the great connoisseur would have defined two illuminators of two generations! Sterling’s rather vague knowledge of contemporary manuscript illumination was both an advantage and a disadvantage. It allowed the author to develop his case on the basis of these two manuscripts, compared with two cuttings from a lost Book of Hours still believed to be by Bourdichon96 and one more manuscript deprived of all but one miniature.97 The fact that Sterling detached his master from contemporary artistic
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developments determines the conception of the Master of Claude of France until today. It thus seems purely consequential that Queen Claude and her painter were just briefly mentioned in the Parisian exhibition France 1500 in 2012, which comprised the French arts from around 1450 well into the sixteenth century and was later shown in Chicago.98 Our master misses the affiliation with the 1520s group that started working shortly thereafter.99
Sterling’s point of view can be explained with his straight conception of chronological developments and also with his fascination for all the unusual inventions in the little prayer book. It does not seem to bother the connoisseur that the logic of his argumentation sometimes suffers a bit: he underlines the traditional conception of the prayer book in a comparison of the two Annunciation miniatures, which he reproduced in colour. He characterised the steep perspective as well as the fact that the miniature from the New York prayer book miss all these developed compositional features that make our full-page miniature a convincing Renaissance work using antique-like monumental architectural designs. Therefore the New York Annunciation should be an earlier work; but then, Sterling stumbles upon another observation: the prayer book is righteously famous for its impressive historiated borders; they develop a marvellous cycle of the
history of salvation filled with very unusual sensations. The sequence is only interrupted by five major Inicipts introduced with head miniatures, although their architectural frames do not really correspond very well with the wide landscapes of the text page borders. Sterling documents this with a juxtaposition of the Annunciation and a colour reproduction of a double page from the prayer book, withholding on the other hand the biggest sensation of the Book of Hours: it is the comparison with the Incipit accompanied by the blue letter S and the armillary sphere. Of course, Sterling himself could not have admired this juxtaposition by that time, since the perception of double pages in our Book of Hours was still disturbed by the inserted paper leaves. The aesthetic contradiction between architectural border designs surrounding the major Incipits and the narrative borders of the text pages lead Sterling to suppose that the original plan for the decoration of the New York manuscript was altered at a certain point. Instead of assuming that the five miniature pages were painted first and the non-text related conception of the historiated borders was developed afterwards, Sterling proposed an inverted history of the book: In his opinion the five head miniatures in architectural borders and the full-page miniature depicting the Trinity on fol. 24v were inserted subsequently. But Sterling proposes this
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Sterling believed that Claude’s heraldry in both manuscripts, which shows her personal arms, not the royal ones, proved that the books were made before she was crowned. This is why Sterling introduced his hypothesis on the highly unlikely construction of the text block. The coat of arms in the prayer book showing the alliance coat of arms of France and fourfold France and Brittany was in Sterling’s opinion Claude’s personal coat of arms, which was first used after her coronation. Neither in 1514, when she married Francis I, nor in 1515, when her husband was crowned king of France, would Claude have already used them. The coat of arms of Queen Claude is shown in the border decoration of the Annunciation. It also accompanies the prayer Obsecro te with a real crown as its crest. On the other hand, Sterling did not believe that it was really the royal crown adorning the letter C on fol. 17 and 17v in our Book of Hours.
Sterling felt himself forced to date the Book of Hours earlier than the prayer book on the grounds of his heraldic analysis. He even tried to explain the aesthetic rupture between the
architectural designs and narrative in the prayer book’s border decorations by assuming that the architectural frames of the head miniatures were inserted after the model of the Book of Hours. Moreover, Sterling identified in the book hours the hand of Geoffroy Tory, to whom several very different manuscripts were attributed now and then.100 This is why he followed Tory’s known itinerary, leading the scribe and publisher to Italy in 1516. Sterling thus supposes that the prayer book was made some time before 1515, followed by the Book of Hours, which could just have been made between 1515 and 1516; Claude then would have had the head miniatures added to the prayer book after her coronation in 1517. At the same time, Sterling made it convincingly clear why the Annunciation in the prayer book precedes the same subject in the Book of Hours. The striking stylistic step that separates both compositions led Sterling to propose even a generational difference between them. He thus separated a master of the prayer book from a younger associate working in the Book of Hours.
Janet Backhouse’s Objections
In 1976, Janet Backhouse could show in her remarkably rich review how doubtful Sterling’s conclusions are in relation to the material evidence of the books. She correctly recognised that both manuscripts contain complementary texts because the prayer book includes passages without asking the necessarily following question of how the indispensible Incipits would have been initially designed. They are however necessary to understand the text and were always integrated in the text block right from the beginning.
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that are omitted in the Book of Hours. In her opinion, the scribe of the smaller prayer book assumed a conventional layout and without having examined the manuscripts Backhouse could reject the thesis of a subsequent insertion of the Incipits with their head miniatures. Since she did not know the collation of the manuscript, which Wieck provided in 2010, Backhouse could just suppose that the rare instances with border decorations that are aesthetically co-ordinated are to be found on the inner bifolio of a gathering. The comparison between the facsimile edition and the collation shows that this is probably not the case.101 However, we agree with Backhouse that the harmony desired by the modern connoisseur was not even intended by the illuminator who painted the illuminated borders.
Janet Backhouse did not comment in detail on Sterling’s separation between an older master and his younger assistant; she just uses the plural form “painters”. Yet, she rejects Sterling’s chronological reconstruction with good reasons. She, together with Myra Orth, belonged to a group of historians who finally got rid the old habit that every manuscript written in an Antiqua or Roman book script had to be ascribed to the great Geoffroy Tory.102 So she disentangled the connection between the manuscripts of Claude of France and the itinerary of this scribe and printer. After that, Tory’s name was not brought into the discussion anymore.
Another important step was taken by Janet Backhouse: She introduced manuscripts of the British Library and the already mentioned prayer book of Renée of France in Modena to the discussion. Whereas she considered Add. ms. 35315 the first step towards the style of Claude of France’s manuscripts, she ascribed the Add. ms. 53214 to the masters working for Claude.103 Even more valuable was her notion of the Modena prayer book of Renée of France, which she placed in the immediate surrounding of the masters, although it employs a third type of border decoration – the superb golden borders with cut flowers in the tradition of Bourdichon.104
The Basis for Further Attributions
When attributions to individual artists are made on the basis of works that are hardly ever seen by anyone, a critical evaluation naturally becomes all the more difficult. After the prayer book and the Book of Hours were unified in the rooms of the art dealer Kraus in New York, they were separated shortly after and sold to different private collectors. The most substantial objections against Sterling’s publication came, as we already mentioned, from a renowned connoisseur who only knew the reproductions published in 1975, most of them in black and white. Other scholars succeeded Janet Backhouse, but none of them probably ever had the possibility to study and compare both manuscripts side by side.
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The captivating illumination of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and the little Saint John in the prayer book resembling Leonardo’s famous Virgin of the Rocks – it is considered to be the earliest evidence of the masterpiece’s early history in France105 – was shown by John Plummer and Gregory Clark in their spectacular exhibition entitled The Last Flowering in New York in 1982.106 The fragile condition of the border decorations, which are partly extended to the edges of the parchment as it is visible in the facsimile of 2010, makes it difficult for the curator, Roger Wieck, to show the manuscript even to chosen connoisseurs. Whilst the history of the prayer book can be traced back through the passing of the manuscript into the collection of the generous Alexandre P. Rosenberg,107 our Book of Hours was sold to a private collector and reappeared just recently.
A rather delicate problem finally results from the fact that the prayer book of Renée of France was stolen from an exhibition on Montecassino in 1994, before the facsimile made in Lucerne was even finished.108 Since this stolen booklet also belonged to one of the children of Queen Anne and King Louis XII, our knowledge of the essential manuscripts produced for the royal family is today limited to two excellent facsimile editions109 and Sterling’s reproductions of the Book of Hours published in 1975.
We thus can outline the basis for all further attributions to the master of Claude of France in the following manner: Sterling himself already undermined the identity of his newly defined master by dividing the surviving works between two different artistic personalities. He ascribed the little that he knew or that his Parisian friends had told him to his supposed master but not to his associate. Whilst he was still considering Bourdichon as the author of the cuttings today conserved in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which are today ascribed to the Master of Claude of France, he rightly identified the miniature in a Book of Hours in the Arsenal library as a work of our illuminator.110
Now, the separation between a master and his associate would not be worth further discussion if the subsequent literature had not followed the ideas that Janet Backhouse developed on this subject. Meanwhile, Sterling’s evaluation of the work could gain new importance when including Roger Wieck’s attribution of the Hachette Book of Hours to the same master who was responsible for the illumination of the New York prayer book.111 New attributions and the separation of master’s hands thus went separate ways in the following four decades, although just a few scholars could have actually seen and studied all of the few works attributed to the Master of Claude of France by then. Whoever looks closely will soon
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realise that nearly all the attributions made to this master were made on the grounds of the illuminations in our Book of Hours, maybe even because of its insignificantly larger size that makes the miniatures easier to read. Our publication is dedicated to this manuscript, which is still burdened with Sterling’s verdict that it could not have been painted by the master himself, simply because it showed a much more convincing mastery of new architectural and spatial principles.
Illumination in Tours in the Aftermath of Fouquet and the Changing Perspectives of Scholarly Attributions
By that time, when Sterling was writing his book and Janet Backhous reviewed it, the artistic production in Tours112 was still separated into two distinct periods, determined by two grand names: Jean Fouquet, who must have died some time between 1478 and 1483, and Jean Bourdichon, who as a witness in the process for the canonisation of Saint Francis of Paula had his identity stated in the Acta Sanctorum. Bourdichon finished his chief work, the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 9474) in 1508. Both artists are rather well documented and were appointed court artists. Bourdichon surely is the one about whom we are informed best by documentary evidence.113 But in addition to him, several other contemporary artists appear in the sources and the artist dictionaries.
They were little studied after the recognition of Bourdichon’s work was substantiated with the attribution of the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany. We thus might not forget that Sterling’s view on the artistic production in Tours around 1500 was deeply shaped by one outstanding artistic personality who at that time still was considered to be the only worthy successor of Jean Fouquet.
The most important artist among the contemporaries of Bourdichon was Jean Poyer, whose name is know only from a sixteenth-century eulogy to painters in France and a handful of documents from Tours (his name was mistakenly read as “Poyet” until recently). It was Avril who initiated the grouping of a very fascinating tendency in the Tours manuscript illumination around this name; Plummer and Clark still used it only with caution in 1982. For the first time, this art could be appreciated in the groundbreaking Paris exhibition staged by Avril and Reynaud in 1993 and finally, in 2004, Mara Hofman’s dissertation appeared as the first monograph on Poyer’s now assembled complete œuvre.
Several works from the first two decades of the sixteenth century were commonly ascribed to Jean Poyer until 1995. Then, Pierre-Gilles Girault opposed this idea on the ground of a verse in the eulogy already mentioned. It was written in 1504 by Jean Lemaire de Belges and speaks of
Poyer
amongst other deceased people, which
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is why Girault deducted that Poyer had died not later than 1503.114 In French scholarship that brought forth some of the greatest connoisseurs of our age but still trembles in reverence of the written word, it is possible to value the verdict of an archivist higher than the reasons of connoisseurs. Instead of following Girault and looking for another name to assign to the works grouped around Poyer, the œuvre connected with his name was pressed into an extremely short period trimmed down to the irrevocable terminus ante quem of 1503, the year of his presumed death.115 Therefore Janet Backhouse’s approach, who did not imagine that the Tilliot Hours could ever fit into a mere corset of an artist’s career tied up to the year of 1503, is forgotten today.116
The actual explosives in that matter are the comparisons to contemporary Italian Renaissance art. Historians of French manuscript illumination are convinced that the most important protagonist of that art in France died at the very moment the young Raphael started to paint his first divine images of the Virgin. It seems as if, in Italy, only the complex architectural settings of Filippino Lippi were worthy of comparison with Poyer’s own works. The Florentine painter was quite young, yet he died in 1504.
At least the literature should capitalise on this chronological reassessment; instead, Poyer’s dramatic stylistic development as it is today
contoured on the basis of surviving works and the assumed period of activity then again seems not entirely trustworthy. His work comprises the retable of the charterhouse of Liget, dated by inscription 1485 and today conserved in the castle of Loches,117 the Briçonnet Book of Hours in the Teylers museum in Haarlem118 and the Tilliot hours in London, which should have been achieved just about fifteen years later if the artist really died before 1503. The situation seems even more problematic when considering the necessarily early dating of the Lallemant missal at the Pierpont Morgan Library (M. 495), which, in 1993, had been dated by Avril and Reyaud around 1510-15. Its border decorations already adapt those Renaissance forms that were introduced in Tours by the Italian Giovanni Todeschino just two or three years before 1503. Moreover, the illuminations of the Lallemant missal itself seem to anticipate an early Mannerism that is not easily reconcilable with the artistic tendencies around the turn of the century.119
Our knowledge of French manuscript illumination around 1520 was developed in a comparably vivid manner mostly through the research of the late Myra D. Orth who also worked on the commentary of the facsimile edition of the prayer book of Renée of France in 1998. She was well acquainted with the development of the Antiqua or Roman book script in France and Italy, and
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also contributed to our knowledge of the Hours of Mary Stuart.120 It was just after her death when Guy-Michel Leproux discovered relevant sources that make it plausible to identify the painter Noël Bellemare, who as member of a Flemish family of painters in Paris played a decisive role in the development of a style, which Orth still had resumed under the term of the 1520s workshop.121
Not even forty years lie between Sterling’s first study on the Master of Claude of France in 1975 and the Tours exhibition in 2012, but nonetheless, the ongoing research had to traverse the picture of an organized topography of art that slowly started to move.122 In the meantime, our idea of the artistic developments in Tours as well as in Paris has changed considerably. Influential artistic movements did not just determine the time of Charles VIII, but also gained importance in the time of Louis XII and the great patron Georges d’Amboise throughout the last decades. What was earlier thought to be the school of Rouen in the milieu of the cardinal and archbishop there is now considered – at least in the case of the more elaborate miniatures – to be the work of the Parisian workshop of Jean Pichore.123 This topographic shift also plays an important role for the Master of Claude of France since some of his works appear in manuscripts closely connected with Rouen and Paris.
A Rapidly Growing Œuvre since 1975
Janet Backhouse, who repeatedly advanced the research on French manuscript illumination in the early sixteenth century and also worked closely together with her colleague Myra D. Orth, added the Add. ms. 35315 and 35214 in London and the prayer book of Renée of France in Modena to the small œuvre which Sterling had surveyed in 1975.
John Plummer and Gregory Clark then followed Sterling’s proposals and literally celebrated the newly defined Master of Claude of France in their exhibition of 1982 by presenting the prayer book as a production of Tours on the basis of the allegedly regionally significant prayers to the Virgin Mary, which would point towards the capital of Touraine.124 Together with the minuscule book, which was not given until recently to the Pierpont Morgan Library by the widow of Alexandre P. Rosenberg and today carries the signature M. 1166, Plummer and Clark paired it with a relatively large lectionary for the Passion Week, which was placed by Philip Hofer as a loan to the Houghton Library, Cambridge, and is now catalogued there as ms. Typ. 122.125 Plummer rejects Sterling’s chronology in his catalogue entry but totally ignores the separation of master’s hands and does not even mention our Book of Hours. On the other hand, he did consider the diverse attributions that Janet Backhouse proposes, but
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none of the manuscripts that she added to the list of the master’s œuvre found Plummer’s approval. He separates both the Modena prayer book as well as the Book of Hours Add. ms. 35214 at the British Library from the single-handed works of the core group. However, he adds three miniatures of the ms. 43 at the Keble College in Oxford126 and a miniature of Saint John on Patmos in a ponitifcal missal in the Parisian National Library, Latin 10578. He
nevertheless did not give any further attention to the topographical problems linked to these new attributions. The manuscript at Oxford, which Wieck still considered to be a collaborative work between Jean Pichore and our master in 2010, seems to have been made in two different campaigns, because all the miniatures ascribed to the Master of Claude of France were added on text pages written in a Roman script, whereas the remaining text block, established for the use of
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Modena, Bibl. Estense a .U.2.28 = Lat. 614
the diocese of Nantes, is written in an older and more traditional script.127
As Maxence Hermant assumed with good reason, the history of the manuscript in Paris has been quite similar: The part containing the missal for the use of Rouen is written in an older script and was decorated in the circle of the Parisian illuminator Jean Pichore. This is not the case for the added pontifical and only this part, also written in a Roman book script, dates from the time of our illuminator.128 The journey from Rouen to Tours, which the book apparently made, can be explained by the fact that it was obviously brought to Tours by Antoine de la Barre. He had been first abbot of Sainte-Catherine at Rouen and was ordered to Saint-Martin in Tours in 1518. After he held the office of the archbishop of Angoulême from 1524 to 1527, he became archbishop of Tours in 1528, an office, which he held until his death in 1547.129 Since Antoine de la Barre also owned the lectionary today conserved at the Houghton Library, which once bore his coat of arms, now erased, it is he who, after first coming to Tours in 1518, turns out to be one of the more important patrons of our painter. Another factor that makes Poyer’s early date of death highly unlikely is the fact that Antoine de la Barre commissioned a Diurnal during his time as the archbishop of Tours. This manuscript carries his coat of arms and was illu-
minated by the workshop of Jean Poyer who is, as we already mentioned, considered to have passed away before 1503.130
Already before the manuscripts ascribed to the Master of Claude of France were studied more carefully, we presented the only known Book of Hours for the use of Tours illuminated in his style.131 Of course, Avril and Renyaud could not disregard this painter, whose personality had just been contoured about two decades ago, on the occasion of their exhibition in 1993: three works were introduced by Nicole Reynaud, who gave her evaluation of the state of research. In her opinion, the two single leaves from the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts, which Sterling ascribed to Bourdichon, as well as the Bathsheba in the Arsenal manuscript ms. 291 already known in 1975, are correctly attributed to the master. She also included the Add. ms. 35315, which was already mentioned by Janet Backhouse but treated with certain reluctance concerning the attribution, amongst the master’s works.132 Reynaud did not add any observations regarding Sterling’s separation of the work into two hands. She accepts the Modena prayer book without Plummer’s objections, as well as the attribution of two Books of Hours on the art market. At the time, we documented and reproduced the only Book of Hours illuminated by this master, which was made for the use of Tours.133
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Roger Wieck, who already encountered the Master of Claude of France whilst cataloguing French manuscripts at the Harvard University and already knew then the manuscript given to the Houghton Library as a loan by Philip Hofer, is not a proponent of all too detailed separations of hands, so he reasonably rejected Sterling’s twoparted attribution of both eponymous works to two separate artists.134 As a curator of manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, he enriched the master’s list of work considerably: his survey of manuscripts ascribed to the master comprised twenty-seven entries in 2010!135 In collaboration with Mara Hofmann, Wieck tried to determine the œuvre of the Master of Claude of France based on the work of Jean Poyer, the illuminator from Tours, whose artistic production has been defined more precisely throughout the past years.136
Hence, the corpus of works connected with the two manuscripts made for Claude of France has grown to such an extent that first Myra Orth, in 1998, and then Roger Wieck, in 2010, could attempt to present a corpus of manuscripts illuminated by this master. Myra Orth’s list is considerably shorter but nevertheless has the advantage of being supplemented with some concrete dates and a bibliography.137 But even Wieck’s respectable listing of works did not yet fully exhaust all the material, which can probably
be ascribed to our master. In the British Library, Nicholas Herman, who is working on Jean Bourdichon, found another manuscript, which he considers to be a work of the Master of Claude of France:138 Add. ms. 18855 from the collection of Sir John Tobin, Liverpool (1851). Together with the manuscripts Add. mss. 18850-18857, it had been acquired by the British Library in 1852 to mark a new peak in the already rich collections of the library. This codex might be the plainest of these eight ravishing manuscripts from the Tobin collection, among them the Bedford Hours and gems of Flemish manuscript production such as the Isabella Breviary and the Book of Hours of Joan of Castile.139
Nicholas Herman finally identifies our master as the artist in charge of the border decorations in some fragments of the Book of Hours of Louis XII painted by Jean Bourdichon, which was long associated with Henry II.140 Also in another major work of Jean Bourdichon, the missal of Jacques de Beaune, the Master of Claude of France painted the border decorations, this time in an enchanting Renaissance fashion of Italian character.141
Maxence Hermant, curator of manuscripts at the National Library of France, follows these attributions in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue Tours 1500 , in 2012. He also brought an extremely interesting fact back to mind that
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Roger Wieck did not know of in 2010. Hermant could identify the Master of Claude of France in one of the most enigmatic chief works of Jean Bourdichon: the Book of Hours of Frederic III of Aragon, Latin 10532 at the National Library of France in Paris. As we know since Avril’s remarks in 1984, the miniatures by Jean Bourdichon were not painted during a trip to Italy, as it was long assumed, but in Tours.142 Painted on very fine parchment leaves, the miniatures were pasted into the manuscript, surrounded by magnificent border decorations painted primarily by Giovanni Todeschino who had come to the Loire town.143 However, the Italian master did not execute all of the borders; on some folios, such as fol. 333, it is apparent at first sight that French associates were working after Todeschino’s models. Whilst the Italian artist had painted two large angels to frame Bourdichon’s Deposition from the Cross on fol. 332v, the conception for this framing was repeated on the facing page, but by another hand. The subtle dotting manner of painting led Teresa d’Urso to justly recognise our painter in these border decorations. She published her results in her book on Todeschino in 2007, and Maxence Hermant followed her attribution.144
From Bourdichon’s Specialist of Border Decoration to the Court Painter of the Queen?
When realising that the Master of Claude of France processed different impulses from the
Italianate designs of Giovanni Todeschino in the Hours of Frederic III of Aragon, one major step has been made: the young artist can be traced back to Tours shortly after 1500 because the Book of Hours made for the exiled king of Naples must have been made before 1503. In this masterpiece, our master appears as Bourdichon’s associate who was not allowed to paint one single miniature but nevertheless was intensely concerned with the Italian novelties that were united with an outstanding example of French art around 1500 in one impressive and unique project of decoration.
Floral Borders and Renaissance Decorum in the Work of the Master of Claude of France
Returning to the point of departure – the two prayer books made for Claude of France – one characteristic, which determined all the numerous attributions throughout the last four decades, is noteworthy: Sterling predicted in 1975, that one day also panel painting would be ascribed to the Master of Claude of France, but to this day no such paintings have been connected with our master. All subsequent attributions were limited to manuscript illumination. The non-historiated border decoration played an important role in the growing œuvre.
This was an unexpected development considering Sterling’s supposition; but to carry the paradox of the recent art historical research to
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the extreme, we might recall that none of the manuscripts associated with the master’s activity as an illuminator specialised in border decoration has anything to do with the decorations we find in the two prayer books that once belonged to the French queen. Neither the dense portrayal of the History of Salvation or the Lives of the Saints in the New York prayer book nor the subtle emblems and heraldry from our Book of Hours reappear in just one of those newly ascribed examples. Wieck could even summarize, in 2010, that the borders painted by the Master of Claude of France are usually adorned with flowers, pilasters and candelabra.145 The latest attributions to our master shape the image of an illuminator who was primarily occupied as a specialist for floral border decorations in the succession of the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany painted by Jean Bourdichon and who at the same time was one of the first specialists familiar with the novel Renaissance decorations brought to Tours by Giovanni Todeschino!
The significance of the floral border can be understood based on the prayer book of Renée of France, which is decorated with a botanical concept and also belongs to the core group of works attributed to the Master of Claude of France. However, in the Modena prayer book as in other works of the master, they stand in contrast with the typical illusionistic borders
(so-called trompe-l’œil borders) with cut flowers and blossoms as we already find them in Flemish illuminated manuscripts from around 1470.146
The ground is preferably painted in gold here and there, but already the delicate touches of dotted brushwork and an advanced rendering of space distinguish the painting technique from all Flemish work. No isolated flowers or fruits that can blossom from little branches with fine green foliage as we find them in Flemish manuscripts,
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Paris, BnF, fr. 19088
but distinctive branches are used to embellish the borders; they emanate from the lower corner of the outer margin and spread into the wide outer margins of the pages.
The practical sense of our painter is already visible in the prayer book of Renée of France. There, he is still using the foliage just cautiously and willingly disregards the inner margins, which he leaves practically undecorated. This might be different in the pontifical of Antoine de la Barre, Latin 10578, but one of the characteristics of our master is his peculiarity of designing his framings on miniature pages by omitting the architectural compartments on the inner margin as if he assumed a complementary decoration on the facing page, although the conception of architectural frames is conceived as a symmetrical unity. This is clearly visible in the Book of Hours we presented in 1989 and in 2000, which is made for the otherwise not common use of Tours, as well as in the ms. 38 in Wormsley.147
It is not an easy task to ascribe border decorations to distinct artists because the connoisseur usually prefers to base his attribution on facial characteristics, which is why the separation of two different master’s hands in the Hours of Frederic of Aragon is most convenient and apparent in the comparison of the miniature page with the Incipit and the angels’ heads in the border of the facing page. Departing from this assess-
ment, it becomes apparent that the pointilistic technique of the Master of Claude of France has nothing to do with the closed forms of the Italian painter Giovanni Todeschino. Accordingly, the frontispiece of Brunetto Latini’s Livre du Trésor (Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 19088) can be ascribed to our master; the execution of the author’s portrait as well as the salamander and the lion, which present the coat of arms, are very close to the depictions in related manuscripts.148
Bourdichon, who could have been the only reliable artistic benchmark for the Master of Claude of France in Sterling’s time, and Poyer, with whom Roger Wieck now associates the master stylistically, did apparently not always share the same conceptions of border decoration. Both illuminators were also active as panel painters,149 but apparently Jean Poyer was not very much interested in novel border decorations,150 with the only exception of the Lallemant missal in New York151 which is adorned with borders of magnificent candelabrum designs.
Bourdichon on the other hand had given an entirely new meaning to this genre in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany.152 The master from Tours worked on this masterpiece for four years and developed a sort of botanical summary of the flora, which not just labels every species with its name, but also depicts their development from its root to the blossoms and fruits. In contrast to the
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decorative mixture of flowers, fruits and insects, which makes the Flemish types of borders very attractive, Bourdichon follows a severity, which renounces the picturesque juxtaposition of foreign species and has to rely on the natural structure of a branch. The Master of Claude of France maintains this accurate structure even if he does not show the root of his plants. This commitment forces him even in large-scale borders such as those in the pontifical of Antoine de la Barre (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 10578) into using just one particular type of flower per page.
The unusual borders in the little prayer book in New York and our Book of Hours stand out from the remaining works attributed to our master; yet, the Modena prayer book of Renée of France opens a decisive historical perspective, in fact, Bourdichon’s border decorations as we find them in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany explain one crucial feature of our master’s work. The unique specialisation proves that the Master of Claude of France was first and foremost a book artist, an enlumineur, as contemporary terminology calls it.
It so happens that our master is already attested in Bourdichon’s workshop before 1503, as an enlumineur and not as an artist in charge of painting miniatures. But we come across a strange paradox: in his first contribution (that is, borders for Frederic of Aragon), while the Master
of Claude of France was working for Bourdichon, yet his decorative patterns do not follow the “master’s” designs but those of a foreigner, Giovanni Todeschino. The Italian brought another type of marginal decoration to France: impressive Renaissance designs adorned with candelabra and architectural elements to allocate the texts and miniatures into constructed architectural frames or aedicules. What a paradox in the course of history! Floral border decorations are often associated with older forms, which are misunderstood as a variant of the Flemish illusionistic borders with sprigs of flowers, but in Bourdichon’s workshop they did not become fashionable until later! In 1503, the Hours of Frederic of Aragon with its strong Italian shape was finished long before the botanical diversity of the Grandes Heures was created in 1508. We have to assume that along the way, the Master of Claude of France worked in Bourdichon’s workshop.
The writing of history would be easier if we just ascribed a certain part of those magnificent borders, which Bourdichon created on the text pages of the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, to the Master of Claude of France. Then again, this idea is opposed by the claim, apparently brought by Bourdichon himself into the discussion over the payment of this tremendously expensive commission, that the work on the
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manuscript would have occupied him personally for four years. The master seems to have had a certain sense for the uniqueness of his work, meaning the autograph execution of his miniatures and decoration. In this regard, I agree with Nicholas Herman, who emphasised this as one of Bourdichon’s main characteristics.153 Therefore we will notice that borders in the style of Bourdichon painted by the Master of Claude of France are more likely to be found in works such as the Hours of Louis XII154 than in Bourdichon’s chief work made for Anne of Brittany.
illuminating the unfinished Incipit pages with traditional subjects suited for the common prayer cycles in a Book of Hours, our master confined his miniatures to floral motives alone, as the fragments in New York show.156
Obviously, our master used his extraordinary talents in painting flowers to prove to his customers that once in a while a floral still life arranged as a colourful bouquet can be as artisti-
Finally, the importance of floral painting in the work of the Master of Claude of France and in contemporary illumination made for the French court at the time is revealed in an astonishing phenomenon:155 we already mentioned that the art of our illuminator flourished in a time that started to mistrust the power of images. Starting in 1517, in Wittenberg, the Reformation was followed – against Luther’s intentions – by iconoclasms much more radical in France and the Netherlands than in most German speaking areas. The affinity to such reformatory tendencies alone explains in my opinion the curious fact that our master apparently finished an otherwise completed Book of Hours, fully embellished with a traditional decoration of initials and borders with flowers and acanthus foliage on a pale gold ground, in a very unexpected way: instead of Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 432
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cally precious as a historiated miniature. Thus, he became the pioneer of a book art that, in contrast to the single leaves in New York, was designed from the beginning as full-page floral adornment filling the ruled spaces of the text pages. In the London Add. ms. 35214, for example, this happens on fourteen pages that carry final lines of different texts; their floral still lifes are only “disturbed” by the rubrics. The painter proceeded in a similar fashion in the Arsenal manuscript ms 291, although there his floral decorations are somewhat conflicted with the justification of the pages; thus, the floral still lifes without borders appear somewhat awkwardly placed on the pages.
Between Bourdichon and Poyer
The artistic development of the Master of Claude of France as a collaborator in Jean Bourdichon’s shop starts, as far as it can be proven on the grounds of datable works, shortly after 1500 with border decorations in a novel Renaissance fashion. Hereafter he could have become accustomed to Bourdichon’s floral borders that were developed in the second half of the first decade of the sixteenth century and found their final form in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany. If we follow the attribution of several border decorations in the Hours of Louis XII to the Master of Claude of France proposed by Nicholas Herman, another probably lasting attachment of our
master to Jean Bourdichon seems reasonable, also during the years when the younger artist broadened his repertoire beyond flowers, architectural designs and candelabra.
Roger Wieck counted a Book of Hours that was sold for Hachette in Paris in 1953 among the early works of the painter. Even so, the motto non Mudera used by Anne of Brittany and subsequently also by her daughter Claude appears in the borders together with the armillary sphere and the paired wings that we encounter in our Book of Hours, too.157 If this attribution is correct, the Master of Claude of France would have followed Bourdichon’s style much more faithfully in his early miniatures. This sort of exact adaptations that go so far as to not only repeat the compositions but even the frames of the miniatures would be isolated examples of a dependence upon the older painter and would mark a singular case in his entire œuvre.
The Annunciation, for example, visibly copies the model from the Holford Hours (Morgan 732) in New York.158 The artistic distance between the generally accepted attributions to the Master of Claude of France and this book supposedly made in the early career of our master seems almost irreconcilable.
Whether the attribution of this little Book of Hours with its seventeen large and fifty-eight smaller miniatures as well as twelve calendar
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This could be due to the influence of Jean Poyer. After all, if we follow Wieck’s list of attributions, the Master of Claude of France collaborated with different followers of the great painters of Tours on several occasions – a coincidence that might not irritate since they were working in the same city. If Wieck’s assumption that the Master of Claude of France had learned more from Poyer
than he had done from Bourdichon is correct, then the fact that he found an employment in Bourdichon’s workshop shortly before 1503 might correlate with the presumed death of Poyer around the same time. But neither the facial nor the figural types can convincingly be connected to those works that are by now ascribed to Poyer.
An Apprentice of the Master of the della Rovere Missals?
This survey cannot be limited to the two sole great exponents of manuscript illumination in Tours. At times, the inherent unfamiliarity of our master with local standards and tradition is emphasised. If one considers only the possible influence of Poyer and Bourdichon, Tours should be considered to have been the adoptive home of our artist, who may have come from far and settled down in the town on the Loire River. But yet another artist has to be taken into account whilst considering the origins of our master; although this painter was recently studied, his influence and importance remain underestimated: he is the anonymous artist called the Master of the della Rovere Missals.159
Even if a basis for his œuvre was contoured as early as 1898, the existence of this striking artist is rarely considered even amongst interested scholars.160 Since Mirella Levi d’Ancona presented a first study of his work in 1959, the images is accepted or not as an authentic work of the artist, it does not change the fact that the painting technique differs from Bourdichon’s brushwork to the same extend as the angels on fol. 333 in the hours of Frederic of Aragon, which were executed in a different style than Bourdichon’s miniatures. The older master always applied his colours in thin, glazed layers to achieve a seemingly polished surface shining like porcelain. A completely different behaviour can be traced throughout the entire work of the Master of Claude of France: Bourdichon’s figural types have nothing in common with the inventions of the younger master. His figural proportions are much larger and the oval shapes of the faces with their pale skin are little or not at all comparable to the rounder heads of the younger artist. Apparently, the Master of Claude of France did not make any attempts to create effects similar to those preeminent in Bourdichon’s miniatures, although he was active in his workshop for an extended period of time.
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master who worked in Rome and in Tours drew the attention of several scholars to manuscripts illuminated by him thereafter. In 1990, Ada Quazza brought a name into the discussion: Jacopo Ravaldi is mentioned in those Statuta Artis Picturae conserved at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome that are decorated with an illuminated frontispiece painted by the Master of the della Rovere missals in 1478. It seemed thus very tempting to identify the anonymous master who decorated those statutes with Ravaldi. Valérie Guéant tried to substantiate this assumption again in 2010.
The name does not necessarily indicate that the artist must have been of Italian origin; it is all the same likely that his name was just given an Italian version when he arrived in Rome. A cross check with archival documents from Tours does not help, simply because the surviving materials are not that abundant. Avril and Reynaud161 assumed that the della Rovere master had begun his career in Tours and had travelled to Italy in between, before settling down in Rome for several decades, during the pontificates of Paul II (1464-1471), Sixtus IV (1471-1484) and Innocent VIII (1484-1492). After a long activity in Rome, he would have finally returned to Tours once again before he disappears around the turn of the century. He spent his most fertile years working in Italy, whereas he was probably active temporarily in Tours some time before
1481. Consequentially, his creations belong in an Italian context. In Tours, the Master of the della Rovere Missals exemplifies two different tendencies: as he was certainly not even a full generation younger than Fouquet, he must have understood the creations of the older artist much better and deeper than most of his contemporaries ever did. He also surely kept the interest in more recent Italian developments much more vividly alive than the older Fouquet, who drew
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Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal, Ms. 432
from the singular impressions of his Italian journey in the 1440s throughout his entire life.
The two manuscripts that were recently shown at the Tours exhibition suffice to give an idea of the artistic development of the Master of Claude of France:162 In a Book of Hours in the Arsenal Library in Paris, ms. 432, the Master of the della Rovere Missals adapts Fouquet’s ingenious invention of full-page paintings, wherein the Incipits maintain their traditional position. This relates to the miniatures to Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, which was created in the 1450s, and already announces the borders in the New York prayer book of Claude of France. The dependence of the Claude master upon Fouquet was brought into discussion by Sterling, but he did not consider the Master of the della Rovere Missals.163
In quite a comparable manner I see several steps connecting Fouquet’s genuine work with the enchanting depiction of the Virgin Mary in the New York manuscript (Morgan 348), painted by the Master of the della Rovere Missals, who transferred the captivating Madonna from the fragment of the Hours of Simon de Varie in The Hague to a modest context, framed with a compartment border that slightly modifies the inherent Renaissance character of the composition. Both miniatures with their strongly
divergent proportions delineate a stylistic range that was certainly accessible during the early years of the Master of Claude of France.
Several arguments therefore make it likely that our painter trained neither with Bourdichon nor with Poyer, but with the Master of the della Rovere missals. This master ensured a more immediate connection with the art and ideas of Fouquet, who had already died before our painter started any apprenticeship. His proportions of bodies, heads and physiognomies are deeply influenced by the Master of the della Rovere Missals and also the layout of the prayer book directly refers to his designs that ultimately derive from Jean Fouquet’s inventions. First of all, the Master of Claude of France learned the dotting manner of painting, which is so characteristic for his work, from the della Rovere master.
He also became particularly receptive for all the revolutionary novelties the Master of the della Rovere Missals learned south of the Alps. If the presumed Jacopo Ravaldi really was the teacher of our painter, the younger man would have lost his connection with his Tours workshop around 1500, since it is quite likely that the Master of the della Rovere missals stopped working around the turn of the century. This would mean that the Master of Claude of France started to working in the shop of Jean Bourdichon not because Jean Poyer (who might well have lived even longer)
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had died in 1503, but after the death of his real master, who had been travelling and between Rome and Tours and whom he met during the last stay in France. If one accepts this hypothesis, it does not really seem peculiar that, when first collaborating with Bourdichon, the Claude master was working together with yet another artist, who came from Italy to Tours: Giovanni Todeschino.
When we are ultimately confronted with the oldest echo of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks in the prayer book of Claude of France, it clearly distinguishes our master’s receptivity and openness towards everything new and exciting that came to France from across the Alps.164
Figurative Miniatures by the Master of Claude of France
The somewhat problematic attribution of the Hachette Book of Hours can only be integrated through a very early dating; consequentially, Roger Wieck places this and related works immediately in the years after the completion of the Grandes Heures, from 1508 onwards.165 The painting technique of these miniatures is characterised by a detailed but coarse dotting brushwork; the colours are so dull that we cannot really compare them with the master’s mature works such as our Book of Hours. Claude’s New York prayer book on the other hand can be connected more easily to the Hachette Book
of Hours and only Wieck’s familiarity with this manuscript explains his attribution.
Even Sterling’s separation of hands could now be reconsidered and lead us in a completely different direction: The artistic features of the Hachette Hours could make it plausible to propose a preceding artist who trained with the Master of the della Rovere Missals. It would then have been this older master who conveyed Fouquet’s artistic tradition to a younger painter who would then have been responsible for our Book of Hours.
One more manuscript could be given to this intermediary master: the London Add. ms. 35214.
Its miniatures are more closely connected to the New York prayer book than it is to our Book of Hours.166 The fact that similar or the same models were used in both manuscripts reinforce this assumption; the angel of the Annunciation, for example, arrives in both instances from the right and is shown in a steep perspective that Sterling characterised to the point. The Adoration of the Magi on the other is based in both manuscripts on a common model, which has also been used for the miniature in our Book of Hours. Hence, the manuscript at the British Library stands between the two books made for the queen.
The attribution of further figural painting departs, as we emphasised earlier, from the Book
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of Hours. The pontifical that supplements the missal for the use in Rouen of Antoine de la Barre (Latin 10578) was surely made in Tours and not before 1518, when its patron became Abbot of Saint-Martin. The same approach is true for the lectionary commissioned by the same prelate in the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Further concrete dates are missing; works by the Master of Claude of France are usually dated around 1515/20, but more detailed or diversified dating are rare, and Roger Wieck avoids them in his list drawn up in 2010.
A more precise chronology of the works by the Master of Claude of France could be proposed when his collaborations with different artists would be studied more carefully. But such cases have to be evaluated with caution. This is true for the Book of Hours at Keble College, Oxford. For Wieck, the Master of Claude of France met Jean Pichore at that instant, although our master illuminated only those passages, which were written in a different script.167 Moreover, the miniatures themselves seem to have been painted in a considerably later period of the master’s career. Here, as well as in the epistles of Saint Jerome, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in which the Master of Claude of France finally worked together with Noël Bellemare, the general impression of a style shaped in the 1520s is undeniable.168
The Relation between the Two Prayer Books of Claude of France
The evaluation of the prayer books commissioned by the queen for her personal use or for her sister Renée plays a key role in constructing the chronology of historiated miniatures illuminated by the Master of Claude of France. At least the Book of Hours and the Modena manuscript must have been made after the death of her father in 1515, because both contain the prayer for the souls of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII. This fact moves them away from the rather hypothetical and complicated beginnings of our painter. However, it does not tell us anything about the New York prayer book, which could without hesitation be dated earlier on stylistic grounds. But the two pages bearing coats of arms, especially the opening of the prayer Obsecro te, resist an early dating into a time when the parents were still alive: As long as it cannot be proven with certainty that this particular heraldry has been added at a later stage, the coats of arms would have to be dated after the marriage and even after the coronation of Claude. Instead, they belong – in contrast to what Sterling thought – to the initial decoration of the manuscript. Thus, even the prayer book with the most traditional and basic stylistic features among the three books must be dated shortly before 1520; not many miniatures in other manuscripts illuminated by
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the hand of our painter, at least none of a fairly mature style, precede this date.
Already Janet Backhouse has shown in 1976 that the Book of Hours and the prayer book of Claude of France complement each other’s textual contents. It seems plausible that our manuscript, containing the calendar, the different offices and hours as well as the Penitential Psalms and the Litany, might antedate the prayer book in New York, which includes Gospel readings, prayers to the Virgin Mary and suffrages to the saints. If this were correct, then Sterling’s observations on the archaic spatial structure in the prayer book
would either lead astray or could solely refer to the compositional models used within.
But a direct dependence of both manuscripts does not seem compelling to me, since there surely was by no means only a single Book of Hours available in a royal household. Claude could also have inherited a manuscript comparable to our Book of Hours from her mother’s possessions, which might have corresponded textually. In a first step, she could have had that manuscript unidentified still complemented with her own prayer book. Not until later Claude would also have commissioned a new manuscript for the main texts and
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fol. 14v-15: Annunciation
offices – our Book of Hours – and would have turned to the same illuminator who had painted her prayer book.
A very different aspect might be added to this supposition. With brilliant intuition, Sterling found a noteworthy weakness in the prayer book: it is the verso page fol. 24v at the end of the third text quire, which carries a full-page miniature without border decoration showing the celestial apparition of the Trinity. The hierarchy of decoration distinguishes this miniature as the most splendid and important one in the whole manuscript, despite the fact that its execution appears stylistically weak. As a full-page painting it would not have been suitable to be placed at the end of a gathering. Therefore, the miniature was certainly not planned from the beginning but was rather executed at the very end to disguise a major break between two individual textual unities, marked by the conjunction of two quires.
What at first appearance seems to be harmoniously unified by miniature painting proves to be an ingenious cover-up upon closer examination. Already the term “prayer book” does not seem appropriate to characterise Morgan 1166 for it is, to be more accurate, nothing else than a junction of two textual fragments of a common Book of Hours. The initial part would have followed the calendar, which is missing, and the final prayers
to the saints would have completed a Book of Hours. The collation shows that both parts consist of clearly separated bonds of quires and the verso page of fol. 24 left blank by the scribe and filled with the Trinity painting marks the crucial caesura. If now the Office of the Virgin Mary, the shorter Hours, the Penitential Psalms and the Office of the Dead followed, we would be facing a proper Book of Hours. The scribe surely had such a manuscript in mind when he planned the little book, whilst he just accomplished its beginning with the Gospel extracts and the prayers to the Virgin, as well as its ending with the suffrages to the saints. The only full-page miniature of the booklet, the Trinity on fol. 24v, was placed against all traditional usage on the blank last page of the quire. The painter thus tried to cover up a disruptive blank space that already Sterling had noticed.
The early history of the prayer book in New York, which consists of nothing else but two parts of a common Book of Hours, might be reconstructed in the following way: When the scribe started his work, surely a complete manuscript was planned. But after the two characteristic text blocks were copied, the project was abandoned, maybe because the very small text pages were too difficult to read. Like a rehabilitated ruin, the entire bundle was illuminated nonetheless and it seems like an incomparable turn of fortune that it was
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The second prayer book made for Claude of France is none other than the Book of Hours this publication is dedicated to. Texts that had already been copied in the New York manuscript were relinquished here. The evolved script marks an important development and might even indicate a decisive reference point: as we discussed above, the slightly larger format of our manuscript allows more spacing between the text lines. It facilitates the reading of our Book of Hours and here, for the first time, the crowded justification is replaced by a more spacious ruling to overcome the constant skipping and switching between lines in minuscule manuscripts.
The decorated borders of the prayer book, densely covered with illuminations in the three outer borders and accompanied by the Franciscan cord in the inner margin, were certainly considered an exceptional invention already at the time of its creation. It was possible to execute such exceedingly rich decorations for the little manuscript with its 54 leaves. But the immense amount of time to create such an elaborate decoration as well as the limited possibilities of reinventing such an extensive figural cycle might have prevented the artist from adapting or repeating this experiment for a larger manuscript.
The very different decoration of our Book of Hours also might have had a different reason that we already touched briefly: The activity of the Master of Claude of France correlates with the time of a growing suspicion against religious images. The contrast between the excessively illuminated prayer book and the intellectual austerity of the Book of Hours would fit very well into these times of radical change. We might remember that almost no other pilgrim followed the rites in the Holy City as unremittingly as the young Martin Luther. His greatest patron, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony had of all people enhanced the old rites excessively before turning to the new ways of the Reformation. It seems to me as if the conflict between the old and the incredibly new played its own part in the patronage of Claude of France. The fact that the master, whom we name after his most famous patron, finally filled empty miniature spaces in older manuscripts with floral still lifes instead of historiated miniatures would be the best proof for such confusion in the queen’s entourage, although she, in her very short life, was still far from changing her confession.
We might hereby not be able to express the distance of time between the prayer book of Claude of France in New York and our Book of Hours in years. Her coat of arms indicates 1517 as a reasonable year of origin for the older book in transformed into a singular and one of the most spectacular works of manuscript illumination of the early sixteenth century.
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A Name for the Master of Claude of France: Eloy Tassart?
The Master of the della Rovere Missals would have taught the later Master of Claude of France the tradition of Fouquet’s art, receptiveness towards Italian novelties and an ingenious handling of the manuscript page as Jean Fouquet had established it in the Hours of Étienne Chevalier and as the presumed Jacopo Ravaldi had used it in the ms. 432 of the Arsenal Library in Paris. The Master of Claude of France would have profited from this knowledge in his first commission from the queen. But we also find a mixture of old and new tendencies in the work of the Master of the della Rovere Missals. Whereas
Fouquet worked primarily with a darker colour palette, Ravaldi’s more modern décor changes into a lighter and more lucent tonality. The white ground regains its intrinsic value, with a growing sense for its non-figurative quality. The miniatures in our Book of Hours also arrive at this point.
The future Master of Claude of France – what he first had to become when the princess, who was born in 1499, was old enough to grant a commission – was working in Bourdichon’s workshop as an illuminator in the sense of an enlumineur. Since he was not yet active as a historieur, an artist who was responsible for miniature painting including figural compositions or religious scenes, his activity has to be seen in close connection with the older court painter. Jean Bourdichon died as late as 1520; the year after, his daughter is mentioned as his heiress.169 Of course, a young painter as the Master of Claude of France could have left the workshop at any time in order to work independently. If, on the other hand, family bonds had to be added to the work relationship, then a continued stay in the household was a possibility.
We do not know of any son who could have continued Bourdichon’s profession. That he was nonetheless unrivalled as the royal court painter until his death seems self-evident; it would be even better understood if, for example, the New York. The illuminator who was responsible for its execution started – as far as his activity is documented and if he was indeed only one artist – his career in the workshop of Jean Bourdichon in Tours, with his own variations of Todeschino’s novel Renaissance decorations. There, he would have learned the floral border designs from the royal painter in Tours. Before that, he would have trained not with Bourdichon nor with Poyer, but with the Master of de della Rovere Missals who was identified with a certain Jacopo Ravaldi; but we do not know whether he was an Italian or a French artist working in Italy for a long time and who might then better be called Jacques Ravaux or Ravauld.
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painter who succeeded him was already involved in his workshop as the son-in-law. We might stop all further speculation at this point if it were not for a new discovery just recently made by Pierre-Gilles Girault: Much conveniently, a new personality appears as the enlumineur de la reine in 1521: Eloy Tassart, who is mentioned in various documentary sources also as Cassart or Tassier between 1517 and 1528. He is mentioned again in 1523, explicitly as the illuminator of the queen. He was working for Claude of France exactly in the period when her prayer book and her Book of Hours were made.170
There is no compelling reason that would force us to date the two manuscripts made for Claude of France in the time around her coronation; her sister Renée, who was born in 1510, could have well received her manuscript with the border decoration in Bourdichon’s style earlier, but then again just a few years before 1520. It is even possible that the Modena manuscript was made while the aged Bourdichon was still working as the head of his workshop. After all, this could explain the rather rough parchment of the little manuscript in Modena.
A dating around 1521 would not be too late
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fol. 35v-36: device in Greek
for the New York prayer book; the time around 1523 would be a reasonable date for the intellectual transition attested in our Book of Hours. It might have been the work of an artist whom we should call Eloy Tassart. Nobody other than the so-called Master of Claude of France may have been justly appointed court artist to the queen, because in Tours, he was certainly one of the most outstanding artists of his time. Since we cannot connect any real history with his supposedly documented name, it is once again an example of how little we gain from the knowledge of historical names alone; they are merely an aid to memory for later times: Jacopo Ravaldi or Jacques Ravaux and Eloy Tassart are names that we remember much better than a Master of the della Rovere Missals or a Master of Claude of France. At the same time, the real names of such artists allow us to change the focus: it is no more their relation with a patron which we have in mind when we speak of them, but their own identity, and this can definitely be called a benefit to our knowledge!
The Hours of Claude of France between Traditional Believes and the Reformation
Throughout the sixteenth century, the French royal house of the Valois kings was associated with a fervent battle against the Reformation.
Books of Hours were still printed in large editions but refined manuscripts were only made for
the highest nobility, testifying a strong opposition against the religious schism. It might seem contradictory to assume that such a sophisticated manuscript made for the royal court could imply an alienation from the traditional Catholic belief. But we have to bear in mind that an openly declared commitment to new religious movements and a certain interest in or even a slight sympathy for these new currents are worlds apart.171
Since Claude of France already died on 26 July 1524, she could not have fully experienced the reformatory aspirations of her age. During the ten years of her marriage with Francis I she gave birth to seven children, of whom six survived her. Since the dauphin Francis died already in 1536 long before his father, it was their second born son who inherited the throne as Henry II.172 Details today believed to be known of Claude’s life are sometimes misleading: If, for example, we read now and then that the term claudiquer derives from the fact that Claude had a luxation of the hip which forced her to limp, this cock-and-bull story can be disproven by a look at the etymology of the word; it is nothing else than an adaption of the Latin term claudicare into French.173 We are far better informed about her interest in fruit cultivation. The green plums, which were cultivated in France in her lifetime, are still today called “Reine Claudes”, named after her.
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Claude apparently shared an interest in books with her mother, Anne of Brittany, and her mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy. Already by the age of thirteen, the little princess was given a presentation copy of a historical work: the Second livre des illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troyes, written by the historian Jean Lemaire de Belges who was invited to join the royal court by Anne of Brittany. Claude’s copy still exists today.174 It was a matter of course that Claude also received a copy of Pierre Choque’s illustrated work on her mother’s funeral ceremony; among the numerous examples, hers is the only one that was embellished with a miniature preceding the opening poem that introduces the text.175 Pierre Choque also dedicated to her his Incendie de la Cordelìere, which describes a sea battle of 1512 that ended with an English victory over the French fleet. Initially, Claude’s mother was supposed to receive this work but it was not finished until after Anne’s death.176
Eulogies on rulers flourished during these years and it is significant that many comparable texts were dedicated to the queen in some way or another: It probably started with Jean Marot’s eulogy on the victory of Francis I at Marignano and continued with the Ballade à la louange de la royne by Claude Chappuis and a chronicle of Clothaire and Radegonde by Jean Bouchet. The author praises the Merovingian queen as a
model for the queens of the present. Guillaume Michel de Tours, who even acknowledged her a place among Boccaccio’s Clères femmes, described Claude’s coronation in his Le Soulas de noblesse as relief of the nobility.177
Around 1500, female patrons and authors gained importance throughout the whole of Europe and Claude kept such women in her courtly entourage. One of them was Anne de Graville, who dedicated her Romant des deux amans Palamon et Arcita, et de la belle et saige Emilia to the queen. The romance is an adaption of Boccaccio’s Teseida. 178 The same lady-in-waiting edited for Claude the famous La belle dame sans mercy by Alain Chartier.179 Of course, such texts always still belong to courtly literature and they rather seem to bring a somewhat nostalgic aspect into a world that was rattled between military conflicts instigated by Francis I and hitherto unseen religious uprisings. It seems to be after all a notable circumstance that, whereas pious treatises were often dedicated to noblewomen of previous generations, apparently no such work has been written for Claude.180
In our discussion of the prayer book and the Book of Hours made for Claude of France we already emphasised a conceptual diversion between both manuscripts that we might qualify as an epochal transition. Janet Backhouse saw in the little prayer book at the Pierpont Morgan
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Such an absurd historic chronology of the manuscripts made for Claude of France that places the New York prayer book after our Book of Hours has to be abandoned. Only then can we truly value the clear structure of our manuscript, which resembles the Medici Books of Hours, reduces the Marian cult and suppresses the adoration of saints. Only then we can understand it as a real emancipation from traditional standards.
Confronted with the dating of the prayer book of Renée of France in Modena, Myra Orth had insistently pointed towards “French Evangelical ideas current by 1525”.181 This was one main reason for her to date the manuscript between 1515 and 1517. Although she assumed that the commission of the books made for the two princesses were contemporary because the same artist was charged with their illumination, she probably never studied our Book of Hours in detail and could just have known the border decoration of the miniature and calendar pages reproduced by Sterling but not those of the text pages. If she had seen their conceptual severity, she surely would have realised that they correspond very well to the ideals of the Evangelical and Protestant movements Queen Claude witnessed just shortly before her death in 1524.
We have no documentary evidence concerning Claude’s attitude towards the religious crisis of her time more precisely. However, our proposed chronology of prayer book and Book of Hours can be reinforced by looking at the role women played in the French Reformation182 and especially by considering the development of Claude’s younger sister Renée.183 Both princesses obviously profited from a sophisticated intellectual education and some contemporary characterisations highlight the idea of inner values that the two women of unfortunate appearance – one is Library (M. 1166) an attempt to supplement texts that are missing in our Book of Hours. As there is a profound shift of aesthetic conception between the two manuscripts, her chronology implies rather a return to an older concept. In the New York prayer book the script is still densely concentrated in a written space that is haunted by a pressing horror vacui and it seems as if there could not be enough images to adorn the text. At the same time, it unfolds not just the short version of the History of Salvation in the four gospel readings and the Passion of Saint John but also includes the two prayers already connected with the texts of Saint John the Evangelist (Protector in te sperantium on fol. 2 and Deus qui manus tuas on fol. 13), the Stabat mater and four prayers to the Virgin Mary, before the old cult of the saints triumphs again in an opulent sequence of Suffrages – a tradition that was raised to question by the new religious movement.
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said to have limped, the other to have had hump – knew how to display favourably.
Although we know relatively little about Claude, the intelligence and the intellectual as well as spiritual development of her sister Renée are intensely discussed in various sources.184 After Renée’s brother-in-law, Francis I, had tried everything to distance her from her old duchy of Brittany, she resided with a French retinue in Ferrara. Noblewomen like Madame de Soubise played in important role in this endeavour and important French intellectuals of the Reformation movement like her secretary, the poet Clément Marot, stayed with her at the court of the Este family. Rabelais was a welcomed guest in her house and even Calvin, who travelled to Ferrara under the false name Charles d’Epeville in 1536, enjoyed her protection, although several Protestants found their death in the Italian town.185 Renée continued her correspondence with Calvin for many years. She just briefly interrupted this exchange when she had to endure a bitter investigation lead by the French grand inquisitor Mathieu Oriz who was summoned to Ferrara on behalf of Renée’s husband, Ercole d’Este.
The inquisitor forced Renée’s subsequent return to the bosom of the Catholic Church upon her. This was however just a pretended conversion as one learns from her will drawn up in 1573. In this document, she clearly states that she wishes to be
buried without a monument,186 in a request that was a total departure from the traditional funeral customs and a rejection of the right granted to the daughters of a king. Renée stayed in Ferrara until the death of her spouse, Ercole II d’Este, in 1559. Then she retired to Montargis near Grenoble, but all her books had already been burned in Ferrara as a consequence of the inquisitorial examination of her belongings. They were destroyed either during the investigation of Mathieu Oriz or after Renée had left Italy for good.
However, Renée’s case proves that it was possible for a daughter of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII, raised in the custody of the new king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, to acquire a certain intellectual freedom. This still appeared strange to Enrico Milano, the director of the Este Library in Modena in 1998, who reveals his astonishment over Renée’s behaviour in several parts of his short biography of the unfortunate princess and duchess.187 Other women who surrounded Claude followed their receptivity for suchlike novelties in a comparably confident way, such as Margaret of Angoulême (of Navarra since 1527), who apparently enjoyed the influence of Lefèvre d’Etaples and the reformers of Meaux.188
Of course, we cannot treat the two royal sisters as if they were one. They share all the same the company of the king’s sister, Margaret of Navarra. Already in the early 1520s Margaret maintained
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close relationships with several theologians, some of which who had to live in exile, and she had her Protestant Catechism splendidly illuminated by an the outstanding artist of the 1520s workshop.189 Yet, some other aspects support the supposition that the royal princesses Claude and Renée were gifted with a comparable intellectual freedom: While Renée came to Ferrara with the Franciscan cord it is said at the same time that she was very fond of astronomy. What if now the armillary sphere in the manuscripts of Claude of France was not to be understood as a metaphorical or emblematic image of virtue, as Sterling believed in 1975,190 but rather a simple depiction of an astronomical instrument? It definitely served a fascinating purpose at the time. The border decorations surely play with the associative implications of religious symbols, as the chaplets and cords as well as the expression of hope for eternal life in the motto. The renouncement of embellishing flowers (although they already have a somewhat pre-scientific orientation in Bourdichon’s botanical depictions) and all the more the abstract idea of symbolism make the Hours of Claude of France a predecessor of the later manuscripts made in the Loire Valley and in Bourges for men like Jean Lallemant the Younger. They transform old pictorial patterns into foreign and distant elements of an imaginary world that is governed by a constant doubting of
life concepts and a rupture that signified the religious schism for all the pious believers.191
In the end, our Book of Hours of Claude of France is a manuscript bound to traditional devoutness. But the sobriety of its text and the severity of its decoration reveal openness towards new thoughts. The Roman Church feared them, because even in the circles of the influential royal courts these novel ideas had a certain intellectual allure.
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tH e sequence of text and i M ages
Our manuscript contains two sorts of images: The calendar opens with pictures of about half the size of the ruled space. These head miniatures with calendar illustrations became popular in the circle of the 1520s workshop. We find them, for example, in the Mauléon Hours in Baltimore (Walters 449),192 or in No. 76 of our catalogue Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI. Whereas in these examples the miniatures depict the occupations of the month and integrate the signs of the zodiac into their skies, they are placed in separate medallions in the outer margins of the calendar pages in the
Hours of Claude of France. They are framed by the same type of border that is also used for the text pages throughout the manuscript. The decision to assign a fixed position to the miniatures of the monthly occupations and frame them with gilded aedicules was apparently not taken at the beginning but in a revised second step. It is already implemented in the calendar designs of Walters 449 and the aforementioned Book of Hours presented in Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI.
In the hours of Claude of France, the architectural frames are limited to the full-page miniatures alone and we can discern two competing concepts
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fol. 3v-4: April
Book of Hours (Private collection): April
doned and the impression seems more suggestive to compare this kind of manuscript illumination to goldsmithery rather than to realistic architecture. Pilasters in the inner margin towards the gutter are reduced in half or even more in symmetrically conceived arrangements and also the columnar constructions lose their symmetrical equivalence.
The crucial difference between the architectural framing of the picture pages with or without an Incipit and the decorations of the text pages is a characteristic of the responsible workshop, in our manuscript as well as in the others by the master. Just a delicate touch of violet accompanies the gilded architectures as an allusion of shadows against the nearly white ground of the parchment; this connects them to the border decorations that also play with gentle shades. The cords, banderols and other motives thereby emerge from their surrounding; the sacrifice of a consistent lighting is somewhat reminiscent of Leonardo’s drawings and the experience of the gently modelled ground they often work with.
The Calendar
The Hours of Claude of France opens, as all complete books of this type, with a calendar.
The Layout
The calendar is written in Latin. In three columns, it presents the Golden Number, the Sunday letters and indications concerning feast days or amongst them: In most cases, the miniatures are –regardless of whether they depict an interior or a scene that takes place in a landscape – framed by aedicules consisting of a solid pedestal, framing pilasters and an attica over an entablature. The pilasters can also be exchanged with columns of the most diverse proto-mannerist inventions, standing on the rectangular base. They usually end in spiral ornaments or volutes instead of an architrave that otherwise would rest on them. A strictly architectural conception is then aban-
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just commemoration days of saints throughout the course of the year. The Golden Number refers to the nineteen lunar cycles; together with this indication the letters for the Sundays helped to calculate the date of Easter. All other moveable feasts of the liturgical year depend on this principal Christian High Feast and when it is celebrated. Both necessary columns could just be used properly when they were supplemented with a list for the years, in which such a book was in use. These so-called almanacs are rarely found in manuscripts, whereas printed editions from Paris almost always included them.193
Naturally, not every day of the year could be occupied by a major hagiographical commemoration and carefully edited calendars also include free spaces simply because not every day of the year was a feast day. In the calendar of our Book of Hours, we already find 7 January to be a day without any dedication. Allowing free spaces in the text block actually contradicts the horror vacui that was the guiding principal of a unified appearance in medieval manuscripts. In order to omit blank lines in our manuscript, every line of the calendar pages that was not filled with the name of a saint or a feast day was decorated with alternating red and blue bars serving as linefillers. Common days were written in black ink, the High Feasts in gold, as well as the commemorations of particularly venerated saints. Also the
two opening lines for each month, which count the days of the month and the lunar days, are written in gold.
The Choice of Saints
Every analysis of a calendar has to investigate to what extent the selection of saints is influenced by personal specifications or local conventions. When, for example, the feast of Saint Genoveva, the female patron of Paris, is mentioned already on 3 January, the reference to the cult of the French capital should become the first focus of attention. This might not be all too surprising, given that the calendar was made for the use of a French queen, even if Paris never played a prominent role in the life of Claude of France, and that the Offices follow the use of Paris. On the other hand, the personal destination for Claude would lead us to expect to find her patron saint, Claudius of Condat, archbishop of Besançon, honoured with a feast on 6 June; but his cult was not widespread until the end of the fifteenth century. That of all saints the name patron of the queen is missing might have been due to the carelessness of the scribe who probably just copied a calendar form that simply did not include Saint Claudius of Besançon yet. His cult did not spread from the Jura Mountains into other French regions until the late fifteenth century. Saint Renatus of Angers, the patron saint of Claude’s sister Renée, is also missing.
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The choice of saints reveals little about Claude’s personal devotions. Local saints of diverse regions appear, such as Rigobert of Reims on 8 January, Hilarius of Poitiers on 13 January, Saint Maurus, first disciple of Saint Benedict, on 15 January and finally Saint Julian of Le Mans on 27 January. Saint Sultrannus (12 February) is one of those martyrs who is not encountered very often in liturgical calendars of Books of Hours. Saint Bernardin of Siena on 20 May precedes the Translatio of Saint Francis on 25 May. Saint Clare of Assisi on 12 August and the feast of Saint Francis on 4 October reinforce the Franciscan orientation of the calendar. Saint Louis on 25 August refers to the royal as well as to the Franciscan tradition. The Visitatio Mariae on 2 July was a relatively late adoption into calendars, as well as the feast day of Saint Roch on 16 August. Also, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino on 10 September can be called an almost modern saint. Saint Januaria must astonish on 21 June; she is briefly mentioned at this date together with another little known saint, Saint Primus, in the Acta Sanctorum. We do know little more about her and can just add that she appears occasionally in Florentine calendars.194 A day dedicated to Moses on 4 September was more common in Italian than in French calendars. The feast of Saint Marcellus on the other hand is celebrated Paris on 3 November and also the feast of the saint bishop Amantus a day later belongs to the
common Parisian rite. Pope Melchiades on 10 December was celebrated in Mainz, Trent and Northern Italy, but is a very uncommon choice for a French calendar. Only the feast of Saint Martin on 11 November refers to Tours, but it was celebrated throughout Europe. The selection of saints in the calendar of our Book of Hours does not offer specific information. There was no effort to harmonise the choice of saints in the calendar and the Litany.
Personal References to Claude of France in the Borders
The border of the January page on the other hand already considerably narrows the possible destination of the book: the entire decoration is developed out of a wattlework of cords that might be distantly related to a type of border design that Italian illuminators had borrowed from much older books, such as Carolingian codices of Verona, which had simplified forms of ornamentation largely derived from Celtic and insular sources and patterns.
But first and foremost, the characteristically knotted Franciscan cord was used for Claude of France; this motif attests a cult that was cherished at the court of Anne of Brittany around 1500, after the queen had founded the sisterhood of the tertiaries of Saint Francis after the death of her first spouse, Charles VIII, in 1498. The cord also adorns the margins throughout the entire book.
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In the wide margins of the first calendar pages however, they are interlaced with an unknotted string that forms loops instead. This motif refers to Louise of Savoy and was adopted by her son Francis I. The convolution of the two different kinds of ropes symbolises the union between the royal couple; nevertheless they do not come from Claude and Francis themselves but were devices of their mothers and remain part of the realm of pious women.
In the calendar, this decoration is alternated with banderols carrying the device of Anne of Brittany non Mudera. It is so short that it can be suitably placed in the upper and inner margins. The assurance to never change was adopted from the mother and is combined with the hope for eternal life and transforms into the Latin motto fir M itas eternitatis spe M duplicat. 195 Surprisingly, it is repeated in Greek: ′H ΒΕΒΑΙΩΤHΣ ΤΟΥ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΥ ΔΙΡΛΑΣΙΑΖΕΙ ΤHΝ ′ΕΛΡΙΔΑ.
The scribe was not proficient in the foreign alphabet or Greek, and this led to repeated spelling mistakes.
The border decoration throughout the entire manuscript principally follows the same patterns for the recto and corresponding verso pages, which was probably inspired by the thin parchment. The medallions for the signs of the zodiac on the other hand, which are placed in the centre of the network of cords and banderols, required
slight modifications between recto and verso.
The original collation cannot be deduced from the sequence of decoration; there is no coherent double page to be expected in the centre of a quire. The ground tone is lilac or lavender that could have been made of amethyst, as its pigment was comparable to purple. It is quite likely that in the age of Humanism, this colour was deliberately used in a manuscript that also contained a Greek motto, knowing that amethyst was the privileged colour of the Byzantine emperor.
The elegant accordance of the border decorations painted in liquid gold and working with white in the banderols is interrupted twice: on the calendar pages of January and July. The first leaf includes a white cord and for July, a banderol forces its way through wattles of cords. Those two pages might each have originally marked the beginning of new quires that were embellished more elaborately.
The Calendar Illustrations
The signs of the zodiac are painted in medallion forms in golden camaïeu on blue grounds adorned with golden stars. Most signs are conceived as full figures; this requires impressive foreshortenings of large animals such as the Taurus or the Lion. As we might expect, the series starts with the Aquarius, shown as a naked boy, and continues with their regular sequence. Gemini is represented as a naked couple of man
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and woman, and in this case as in the case of Virgo, the space is only sufficient for half-length figures. Sagittarius appears as a centaur from the left in such a way that his rear legs, which do not fit completely into the small medallion, are cropped. Capricorn grows, as in many comparable representations, from an Ammon’s horn. These images have nothing to do with the probable astronomical interest of Queen Claude and they originate solely in the imagination of the illuminator and the traditional representation of the signs of the zodiac in calendar illustrations.
The pictures of the monthly occupations on the other hand are treated with greater interest; their unusually large size even disturbs the order of the calendar. In general calendar pages in Books of Hours differed from the text pages as in most cases they were ruled in seventeen lines, to allow the first part of the month on recto pages with two title lines for the name of the month and the indication of how many days and lunar days one had to expect and the first fifteen days, whereas the second half of the month followed on verso. In our Book of Hours, there is no difference between calendar and text as far as the ruling is concerned, which provides twenty-two lines for the whole manuscript. In the calendar, the months are introduced by large miniatures that occupy between eleven and twelve lines, and since February is the shortest month of the year,
its picture is particularly large, placed above just eight lines of text.
Most of these squared miniature spaces are filled with images of activities characteristically associated with the month. Most scenes are set in landscapes; the figures are rather large, therefore the sky is often reduced to a narrow stripe. The sequence of illustration follows a tradition, which was nearly one hundred years old by the time this Book of Hours was made. The occupations of the months depict the labour of the peasants and the amusements of the nobility, with more pictures of the good living of the aristocracy in the first half of the year.
Before 1416, the Duke of Berry, was portrayed in the first calendar miniature of his famous Très Riches Heures in Chantilly, opening a magnificent series of images of courtly splendour and enjoyment. In the course of the fifteenth century, the interest captured in the illustrations of the monthly occupations was moved towards the bourgeois milieu of the illuminators, who were constantly attached to the court only in exceptional occasions. The same is true for the illustrations in the Hours of Claude of France, and whoever tries to find idealised representations of the queen and of her court will be disappointed.
January was traditionally associated with festive eating and drinking. At a round table of rather
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uncommon shape, a young man and a lady sit; they appear to be rich burghers, and not aristocrats or courtiers. A servant approaches them from left, whereas the fire in the chimney blazes to the right. The sequence of letters inscribed in the upper part of the back wall has been identified with a painter’s signature, yet no one has succeeded in deciphering pvsifoncu H aoe. The most important series of calendar illustrations from the 1520s group is found in Walters 449. There, in the miniature illustrating January, gamblers shooting dice occupy the table.196
The scene illustrating February is strongly rooted in the bourgeois milieu: a man and a lady sit in front of a chimney to warm themselves. Whilst the woman in the preceding miniature was wearing a black bonnet like Anne of Brittany in several depictions, the white colour of the lady’s cloth in the miniature for February could indicate a lower social rang.
The tradition of calendar illustration included the shift between the lives of the rich and the peasant’s labour in the fields. March is introduced by a view over a bleak vineyard and a green meadow, which leads the beholder’s glance to a fortified town in the background, whilst two men using a kind of billhook cut down the grapevines in the foreground.
We then encounter a notable change of setting in the April miniature: two noble youths have
departed for falconry. The artist depicts one of them frontally, whereas the other is shown from behind standing close to the bordering woods. Also, the month of May is usually accompanied by depictions of good living. Courtly lovers rest under mighty trees. The young man with a lofty feather adorning his red hat reaches for the hand of a young maiden who has covered her hair with a fine veil. Shrubs and trees, among them a barren branch, enclose the scene from both sides to retain the intimacy of their encounter.
In June, we return to the work of the peasants: the grass has grown high, interspersed with plantains and red poppies. Two reapers have already cut a part of the pasture with their scythes. Food and a little drinking bottle lie on a blanket in the left foreground. The artist alternates the rearview figure and the profile figure; they both need to bend their heads down to cut the grass so that the horizon line runs just above their heads. The gaze of the spectator is drawn into the distance as in the representation of March. Since the time of Jean Fouquet, the gently curved contours of the landscape of the Loire Valley were depicted like this.
Whereas in June, the reapers had cut something like an angular swath into the high grass, the head-high corn almost builds a wall around the men with their scythes in July. It has risen so high that the sky is reduced to a thin strip above
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tration already appears for September instead of its traditional association with October.
The wine pressing follows in October: before the dark, stone walls of the wine cellar with a row of impressive barrels we see a large trough and a boy who has stepped inside of it. With his bare feet, he crushes the grapes that are brought in tubs by two young men. The scene is depicted in a peculiar aerial perspective; the cottony brushwork and the bland lighting create an atmospheric effect that corresponds to the fact that the room corner on the left is not treated with a perspective dynamic but rather seems to be spread onto the flat surface.
After the reversal of the occupations of September and October, placing the wine pressing before the seedtime, the course of the monthly occupations returns again to the proper sequence in November: a young barefooted shepherd leans against a high tree trunk. His herd of swine crowds together below the crowns of the trees and above their tops, with only a narrow part of the sky still visible. The acorns they are supposed to eat were not struck down from the trees by the shepherd this time, but are already dispersed on the ground.
The occupations of the months end with a depiction of the pig slaughter in December, and it is hard to avoid having the impression that it was one of the animals we just saw being fed with their heads. Again, the workers have put their drinking water in a clay jug to the left. The artist ingeniously placed a figure stringing a sheaf in the centre of the composition. The delimited spatial construction of landscape scenes that follows a kind of composition developed for interior scenes with just one corner shown is again used in the miniature for August. Here, we do not look upon a field but a cobbled road running along between two houses. The gaze falls upon a wall made out of bricks in the middle ground. Against the common direction of reading, a worker approaches a gate from the right; he carries a heavy corn sack. A man of a higher social weight wearing a fur-lined coat follows him, as if he would accompany his servant to the mill that did not fit into the picture anymore. Only in the September miniature, the figures move deeper into the spatial depth of the image. Here again, the artist plays with the constructive idea of an interior corner that retains the continuum of the extended landscape. Whilst the workers are occupied with the new sowing for the next year, they cultivate a field, which bends around a corner and is surrounded by bushes and woods; over the top of trees, we look upon a delicately outlined tree disappearing in the haze. A sower approaches from the right, turning towards another man, relocated in the background, who is shown en face. Against the more common sequence of occupations of the month, this illus-
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acorns in November. A wooden container stands in the foreground. The pig has been laid on a modest wooden table where it had just been killed and two young peasants approach the animal with large knifes to start their work. The miniature’s spatial construction is spread out more generously than in the other representations and is encircled by a gutter and two houses in the middle ground. The painting technique appears again to be characterised by a delicately dashed and vivid brushwork, best visible in the two faces of the beardless men. The atmosphere is rather cool without really conveying the impression of a cold winter’s day. The calendar miniatures made for the Books of Hours of the Duke of Berry, refined masterpieces of the Limbourg brothers in the Duke’s Belles Heures that are subsequently developed in even more prominent calendar pages especially designed for his Très Riches Heures, begin a tradition that was adapted in the Dunois Hours, Yates Thompson 3 at the British Library, and continued throughout the fifteenth century. However, depictions of the monthly occupations are more commonly connected with Flemish book culture and their illustrative traditions. That the contributions of French artists to this genre are widely ignored can be seen in Wilhelm Hansen’s publication of 1984, which limits its survey of contemporary French manuscripts to Bourdichon’s Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany alone. On the other hand the Flemish calendar
illustrations of the Master of the Dresden prayer book and the monumental adaptations of the Limbourg’s designs in the Grimani Breviary painted by Gerard Hourenbout are generally known. The knowledge of works from the immediate cycle of the 1520s workshop, which also developed a vital and trendsetting art of calendar illustrations, is still limited to those expert circles familiar with Myra Orth’s contributions on this group of works and artists.197
Certain uniformity in the pictorial compositions for the monthly occupations is achieved by limiting the protagonists to just two in every scene. This concentration on a reduced figural composition could be derived from Flemish models. It could be suggested that the compositional patterns of bas-de-page or marginal sceneries were adapted to a new page layout. Also in the calendar illustrations of the 1520s group do we find images placed inside the ruled space of the page, either in broad horizontal formats or in squared miniatures fields as they decorate the calendar in our Book of Hours.198 The limitation to just two main figures is abandoned in the calendar miniatures of the 1520s group; this fact might be valued as an argument for a relatively early date of origin of the calendar in our Book of Hours, which is not the only example of an illustrated calendar decoration in the work of the Master of Claude of France: In the London Add.
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ms. 35315 (from the Rothschild bequest to the British Library), the depiction of the occupations of the months and the signs of the zodiac are placed in the borders.199 Les Enluminures offered for sale a series of eleven miniatures painted by our master showing comparable designs. Only the illuminations were cut out of the original pages of a calendar from a lost Book of Hours, most of the text is lost. Little arches containing the signs of the zodiac originally topped the broad landscape designs.200 Although the motifs remain unaltered regarding their iconographical subjects, they do not correspond to our miniatures in any concrete composition so that the direct comparison between the slightly larger fragments in Paris and our calendar illustrations serves to outline the superior quality of the decoration in our Book of Hours.
The Office of the Virgin and the Mixed Hours of the Holy Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit and Hours of the Conception of the Virgin
The eponymous text of the Book of Hours is the Office of the Virgin. It consists largely of psalms and canticles, which are biblical texts, and it often also includes the Te Deum at the end of Matins. In addition to the biblical readings there are chapters taken from the Song of Songs, antiphones and various short prayers. The selection of texts often varies, depending on the specific local use of the Book of Hours (in Latin this is
called consuetudo, usus or ritus). The individual use of a Book of Hours follows either diocesan or monastic rites. The use for Paris is the most common in early fifteenth century French Books of Hours because it was not just limited to the use in the capital but also considered appropriate for the whole of France. By 1500, the universal use of Rome was so widespread that most of the other regional rites became the exception. But it is not the Roman rite that was adapted for our Book of Hours, nor was it the use of Tours; our Book of Hours is conceived for the use of Paris and this circumstance is even emphasised by a golden rubric on fol. 15: Incipit officium Christiferæ virginis Mariæ secundum vsum ecclesiæ parisiensis.
The Office of the Virgin is divided into eight hours, starting with Matins. The first hour is read during the night, followed by Lauds, which is traditionally read at sunrise. Between six o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, the shorter hours of Prime, Terce, Sext and None are read, whereas Vespers coincides with sunset. The daily prayer ends with the reading of Compline at the beginning of the night. Following the monastic rite, the Matins, that is, the set of prayers during night would have to be split up into three nocturnes to be read at nine o’clock, midnight and again at three o’clock in the morning, but laics were allowed to divide this text and to then read them succes-
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sively in the course of the week. A certain sense for simplification in the texts in most Books of Hours often motivates the sole repetition of the three psalms whilst suppressing all other accompanying passages, especially the set of three lessons. In our Book of Hours, the sequence is quite extensive: every group of psalms is followed by three lessons. Hence, Matins of the Office of the Virgin, including three complete nocturnes, is the longest passage in the entire sequence, and it is structured in a rather unusual way: three four-line initials precede the different nocturnes dispersed over different days of the week (Sunday, Monday and Thursday; Tuesday and Friday; Wednesday and Saturday on fols. 16v, 20v and on fol. 24).
The liturgical year did not govern the course of the Office of the Virgin; thus, strictly speaking, it cannot be counted among the liturgical texts. In our manuscript only one textual variation responds to the change within the liturgical year: the beginning of Matins in the time between Septuagesima and Easter (fol. 15); the most important “liturgical” variant, the so-called Office of Advent, that is usually placed at the end of Compline is omitted in our Book of Hours.
Since the Office of the Virgin – its main component being psalm readings – was read parallel to the Hours of a differing devotion, it must have seemed suitable to integrate their shorter reper-
tory of seven hours into the course of the eight hours of the main Office. In France, the Hours of the Holy Cross and the Hours of the Holy Spirit were the most common additional Hours; they are in our example supplemented by the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin. Since all shorter Hours are reduced to seven praying hours alone because they are missing Lauds, their Matins was usually read after Lauds of the Office of the Virgin.
The shorter Hours were commonly introduced by only one miniature for Matins. In our manuscript, they are preceded by images of the Crucifixion on fol. 38, Pentecost on fol. 40 and the Meeting at the Golden Gate on fol. 42, before the cycle of the life of the Virgin is continued with the Adoration of the Child for Prime on fol.
45. The end of every hour of the Office of the Virgin is then followed by the adjacent Hours of the Holy Cross, the Holy Spirit and the Conception of the Virgin on fols. 47v, 48 and 48v.
The Office of the Virgin is traditionally accompanied by eight scenes of her life, beginning with the Annunciation, followed by scenes from the infancy of Christ and ending with Mary’s coronation in heaven after her ascension. This pictorial cycle is only disturbed by the placement of the head miniatures for the supplementary Hours, which disrupt the continuous depiction of scenes from the Life of the Virgin. One
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of these interposed images is an account of the Passion of Christ, whilst the other is dedicated to the foundation of the Church, two events that took place long after the infancy of Christ. The third head miniature, which opens the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin, shows the Meeting at the Golden Gate, the beginning of the legend of the Virgin Mary’s life that naturally predates the birth of Christ. Regarding the question of a probable narrative understanding of picture cycles in Books of Hours, nothing could be more revealing. Since the Crucifixion, Pentecost and the Meeting at the Golden Gate disrupt the sequence of the cycle for the Office of the Virgin, a narrative sequence of images became virtually impossible.
From now on, the miniatures are always framed with architectural borders that are designed with larger proportions towards the upper, outer and lower margin in order to adapt to the characteristic page layout, which includes a much narrower inner margin; already the design took this particular orientation of the page layout into account and so it is not surprising to find that certain elements of the architectural frames were simply cut off. Either the frames were already planned with cropped edges or they were simply cut off during the process of creating the design on the manuscript page. This was apparently a special characteristic of the painter, who was respon-
sible for the designing and the execution of the frames that are in principal conceived symmetrically. The illuminator then just cut the edges or simply did not draw all its parts in order to fit it onto the page and to meet the requirements of its layout. At the same time, the architectonical construction of the frame reacted to these prerequisites characteristic for illuminated manuscripts and included smaller and thinner supports that were placed in the inner margin and were additionally decorated with different ornaments than the supports – columns or pilasters – of the horizontal crowning in the upper margin. The asymmetrical conception of the page layout thus also governed the architectural border designs.201
Full-page miniatures introduce the first two hours of the Office of the Virgin; the Incipits of the two texts are decorated with five-line initials on the following page. Accompanying the Annunciation, the introductory initial is placed on the opposite page and can be perceived as an optical unity together with the miniature; the Visitation however cannot be seen together with its corresponding Incipit, although it would have been an easy task to create a different layout. The full-page miniature of the Visitation is not placed on the blank verso page of fol. 29, but on the following recto page. Consequentially, the Incipit had to move to fol. 30v. With the opening
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of Matins of the Hours of the Holy Cross, a more common layout had been employed, using head miniatures above several lines of text and a large introductory initial.
With the exception of the opening miniature of Matins of the Office of the Virgin on fol. 14v, all other images are placed on recto pages. All the miniatures are preceded by an empty verso. This was the common practice throughout the entire book: a blank page without decorated borders precedes every miniature page. Facing empty pages and fully decorated pages with head miniature was rare in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In order to guarantee this uncommon feature throughout, entire leaves were sometimes left blank; already before the Annunciation to the Virgin, fols. 13r-14r were left blank. Preceding Matins of the Hours of the Holy Cross is one leaf without any text adorned with a decorated border on its recto but left entirely undecorated on its verso. Before Vespers and Matins of the Office of the Dead, again two entirely empty leaves appear (fol. 90 and fol. 96), whereas Lauds then again faces an empty verso page (fol. 112v).
This circumstance is more than just unusual and could point towards a change of plans. The layout for Matins of the Office of the Virgin follows an Italian standard that was also common for Flemish Books of Hours and essentially works
with the conjunction of a full-page miniature on a verso page, which is adjusted to a decorated Incipit written on the facing page. The blank verso page preceding the Visitation and its layout as a full-page miniature on a recto page (which displaces the Incipit to the following verso page) is most unusual in this context. It proves first and foremost that scribes as well as painters did not feel particularly indebted exclusively to Flemish or to Italian customs of manuscript design. But one has to keep in mind that in France, especially in Bourdichon’s œuvre, the idea of opposing images and Incipits was renounced.
The only reasonable aim of such a practice in Bourdichon’s workshop was to save space by inserting the images on the next blank page following the ending lines of the text, regardless of their orientation as rectos or versos. But our scribe did not try to save space, quite to the contrary he left the entire double page of fol. 29v/30 blank, although he could assume that the painter also would place just one full-page miniature there, as he had already done for Matins with the full-page miniature of the Annunciation. This cannot possibly be related to the Italian origin of the script even if there are more signs of Italian influence: In that tradition the spacious areas were often reserved for the large initials and also the distinction of major Incipits by a line of special Capitalis script. In Italy however, two
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entire pages without text would have never been reserved for two miniatures.
After the disturbing treatment of Matins and Lauds of the Virgin, a rule is strictly observed from Matins of the Hours of the Holy Cross on. Up to the end of the manuscript the Incipit, always on recto with some lines of text, is connected with a head miniature, placed opposite a blank verso page in a way that suggests a Flemish model. But there the blank verso pages would have offered sufficient space for supplementary full-page miniatures facing the executed head miniatures from the infancy cycle.
Therefore, at a certain point between the end of the work of the scribe and the illumination of the Matins of the Holy Cross, such a supplementary image cycle could have been planned for our manuscript but was finally never executed. It could have, as in the Berlin hours of Mary of Burgundy and the emperor Maximilian, illustrated the Passion of Christ. It is also likely that the additional series of full-page miniatures was nurtured by comparative illustrations chosen to fit a typological thinking that would have been taken from the Old Testament.202 The denial of speculative traditions and the restriction of imagery, both clear characteristics of the evangelical tendencies in French book illumination of the 1520s repeatedly evoked by Myra Orth, would point towards a reason for the modesty of execu-
tion at the end, not planned at the beginning. It might be all the same plausible to assume that the pages with miniatures were separated from the text pages to omit the contrasting effect of opposing architectural frames and the common border decorations of the text pages after it was put to the test at the beginning of Matins.
The topics of the executed miniatures adhere to the common French tradition established for the individual hours of the Office of the Virgin: the Flight to Egypt and not the Massacre of the Innocents introduces the Vespers; the last miniature for Compline has already replaced the older iconographical choice of the Coronation of the Virgin with the so-called Assumpta showing the Mother of God entering Heaven, which had already been used by the previous generation of Jean Bourdichon. In our example the artist even tried to consolidate the two different iconographical traditions by representing the Virgin floating in a splendid aureole crowned by God, who is represented as a small, half-length figure at the top of the red seraphim mandorla surrounding the Virgin.
The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (fol. 14v) for Matins of the Office of the Virgin (fol. 15)
French artists usually favoured a sacral interior for their Annunciations to the Virgin Mary, even if they occasionally surrounded the Virgin with domestic motifs. In the Netherlands, artists
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preferred the setting in a bourgeois bedchamber, sometimes fit for a Duke, whereas in Italy the play between interior and exterior ambience was predominant: there, the archangel Gabriel often approaches the Virgin from a private garden side and steps towards the threshold of an open loggia where the Mother of God has taken a seat.
With that pointed out, it is clear to see that our miniature again strives for a compromise between Italian and French conventions: monumental Renaissance architecture of a sacral character composes the setting. The different structural elements are built up like Italian arrangements of a garden flanking a loggia; but in our example no glance at the sky is revealed and we consequently do not know with certainty whether the scene is taking place in an interior or not. A massive round arch rises on the left side, slightly set back. Probably two columns support it but the outer one is cut off by the edge of the image on its left side. Above the entablature, another upper register decorated with columns arises. This entablature breaks down in a square angle on the right side of the construction, where three pillars below it form the loggia, before it again describes a square angle break and then disappears behind the framing, in parallel alignment to the image plane.
The angel approaches from the left but he did not step into the scene by striding through the arched
portal, which is optically associated with him but opens parallel to the image plane. Gabriel kneels on a ground of light green tiles outside of the colonnade that separates him from the Virgin. One cloth of a tent-like red canopy, which rises above her, is wrapped around a column on the side that the angel approaches. He raises his right hand and although his sceptre overlaps the centre column, it does however not penetrate Mary’s realm. The golden rays shimmering down from the upper left corner likewise seem to halt right in front of the colonnade. The dove symbolising the Holy Spirit, which is about to overshadow the Virgin Mary, hovers upon these celestial beams directed at the future Mother of God. The lack of actual penetration of the pictorial space assigned to Mary might have been understood as one of those trite allusions to her virginity before during and after the birth of Christ.
The Virgin, dressed in a violet robe and a blue mantle, contrasts gorgeously with the dark red ground. The angel’s Ave has interrupted her silent prayer; her left hand still rests on the open book, whilst she is protecting her chest with the other. The entire composition is a subtle reflection of spaces and their assignment to the angel and the Virgin as we find it in so many Italian depictions of this subject. Gabriel occupies a funnel-shaped space seen in perspective, which expands from the depth of the image forwardly,
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whereas the columns of Mary’s loggia designate the centre of the composition. The area assigned to her maintains the intimacy of a bedchamber despite the monumentality of its architectonic structure. Characteristic errors in the rendering of perspective common with painters from the North indicate that the designer of this interior was not an artist trained in Italy: the scuncheon of the arch on the left side of the miniature glaringly contradicts the alignment of a stringent perspective construction and the prayer stool has no junction with any perspective line of the entire composition.
The composition however creates a vivid and dynamic spatial suspense between the opposing areas of the miniature with the dove of the Holy Spirit and the divine messenger on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other. The conventional orientation from left to right is valid, which places Gabriel on the dexter side and describes his penetration of Mary’s environment from the left according to the traditional direction of reading as do the majority of images showing this subject. The perspective lends his figure a sense of action, whereas Mary, who seems closer to the beholder due to the train of her mantle, incorporates the intimacy belonging to the Virgin. The colouring is altogether exceptional: both figures are adjusted to an interaction between red and blue with an interposed violet; the blue appears with a full-bodied pigment in Mary’s garment,
whereas the red colour of Gabriel’s vest is highlighted with white layers of paint. The painter obviously wanted to contrast the aerial figure of Gabriel with the terrestrial Virgin.
The tabula ansata (a tablet with dovetail handles) in the pedestal of the miniature frame could have accommodated the Incipit in the tradition that Fouquet had established for manuscript illumination in Tours, but the strongly abbreviated beginning of the angelic salutation ave gracia plena d(oM i)nus te(cu M) is inscribed in golden majuscules on it instead. In contrast to the works illuminated by Fouquet, Bourdichon or Poyer, a four-line rubric in gold followed by one blank line succeeds on the facing page. After that, a five-line initial with a superb framing border appears, which does not relate aesthetically to the miniature itself as opposed to the often-cited examples of Flemish manuscript illumination.
The Master of Claude the France otherwise apparently preferred the reversed orientation of the Annunciation: the compositional pattern, which he used in the New York prayer book, seems to have been the most commonly varied model in his works. He used it, for example, in the Book of Hours for the use of Tours, which we presented in 1989 and again in 2000.203
The Visitation for Lauds (fol. 30)
The course of the text could have inspired the scribe as well as the illuminator to place the
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miniature preceding the hours of Lauds of the Office of the Virgin on fol. 29v; this would have resulted in a double page depicting a full-page miniature and the beginning of the text. To not dissociate image and text entirely, the rubric is this time inscribed in the architectural pedestal of the frame: ad laudes; however, it is followed by an almost identical two-line rubric in gold on the verso page. Whereas the Annunciation was framed by an architectural construction of slender columns, which allowed the framing to be slimmer towards the gutter, the modest combination of two pilasters adorned with red stone intarsia give occasion to simply cut the edge of the construction in the inner margin in half.
As Saint Luke relates, the angel of the Annunciation told Mary upon his arrival at her threshold that her cousin Elizabeth, who had long passed her childbearing age, was miraculously with child. So the Virgin had wended her way, crossing the mountains as the same gospel accounts, to seek Elizabeth. The miniature shows little of the arduous journey, and the meeting of the two women takes place in a flat landscape setting so that neither the direction, which the Virgin took, nor Elizabeth’s domicile are of any importance in the compositional structure of the miniature. Instead, the foreground is separated from a just slightly higher meadow by a short cliff edge. There, some shrubs are lined along a path leading
to a grand architecture, a town or an impressively large castle, which rises behind green trees and bushes. Just a narrow strip is reserved to depict a light blue sky.
The figures do not reach up to the horizon; the gentle inclination of the heads additionally emphasises the humility of the two women in their encounter: Mary, dressed in a violet robe and a blue mantle, approaches her cousin from the left. She is slightly closer to the beholder and is followed by Joseph, who carries a bundle over his left shoulder as if it were supposed to separate him compositionally from the Virgin. Elizabeth wears a white and black wimple, which distinguishes her as a married and wealthy woman. She approaches form the right, accompanied by a servant maid. She steps towards Mary and because she meets her in a slightly oblique angle, her position in the picture plane is sensibly higher than Mary’s. Her entirely devoted attitude on the other hand shows that the whole honour of the more important person is given to the Mother of God. The cliff edge at the level of the figures’ arms resembles an optical band unifying the main figures.
The Crucifixion for Matins of the Holy Cross (fol. 38)
The generosity of handling the blank pages is even exceeded in the transition from Lauds of the Office of the Virgin to the interposed Hours:
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Here, an entire leaf is given away, since on fol. 37 only a one-line rubric is written in the illuminated border, although the text would have easily fitted on the last two blank lines on fol. 36v. The following verso page remains empty because the scribe continued with the subsequent beginning of the text occupying four lines only on fol.
38. Towards the gutter an architectural border including the Incipit has been radically cut again and frames the head miniature. Since the depiction of the Crucifixion works with a particular elongation, the miniature is not forced into a rectangular form but is instead surmounted by elegantly curved volutes and thick acanthus leaves spreading from them and curling towards each other on the top.
Depictions of the Crucifixion are almost always arranged in the picture plane in a way that the width of the cross and the figure of the saviour determine the proportion of all the other figures.
When the two flanking crosses are omitted, as it is the case in our miniature, then painters usually tend to literally stretch Christ’s cross into the frame and this time, its volutes even overlap the edges of the crossbar. When artists started to respect the height of the horizon in a landscape, they focused more and more on the correlation between body masses and the view into the distance. In our miniature, the terrain developing into the middle ground raises behind
the knees of the crucified Saviour along a rocky range of hills to the top left of the miniature until it reaches the height of the frame’s impost.
At the level of Jesus’ loincloth, the contours of the silhouette of the city of Jerusalem loom in the blue colouring of the far distance and the saviour’s entire upper body ascends before the sky, with the loincloth fluttering in the wind. The Virgin helplessly collapsed on the ground, her arms wrapped around the favourite disciple John. Mary is placed before the foot of the cross whereas Mary Magdalene kneels behind its trunk to imploringly embrace the wood of the cross.
Slight inconsistencies in the placing of figures in the image space and their proportions show that the artist worked with different patterns and models from older depictions of the crucifixion. This is also true for the group of soldiers on the right that the miniaturist nevertheless used for an ingenious idea. The small space available for the Roman soldiers on the right left no room for a horseman beneath the cross, although it is precisely this motif that drove the ambitions of Renaissance painters. To include this element, the master lets two horsemen approach from the front right, overlapped by the miniature’s frame in order to emphasise their impressive volumes and accentuated by the colourful harness stretching over the horses’ backs. It is their physical presence in the compositional structure, not their
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active part in the action that interests the illuminator most. The alighted figure of Mary and the two horsemen shown as repoussoire figures ultimately derive from Jean Fouquet’s models, which were frequently varied in manuscript illumination in Tours as well as in the Liget altarpiece at Loches.204
Pentecost for Matins of the Holy Ghost (fol. 40)
Since the Hours of the Holy Ghost are rarely accompanied by an entire picture cycle, it is the Pentecost Miracle that usually serves to identify Matins of the Hours. Most depictions of it try to gather the apostles around the Virgin Mary. The Biblical account in the Acts of the Apostles is almost never depicted in Books of Hours: it does not even mention Mary as a witness but describes that the epiphany of the Holy Spirit was witnessed by a uncountable throng of people from all over the world who had flocked to Jerusalem; the internationality of the numerous pilgrims justified the astonishment over the fact that every single person present at the miracle could understand the words spoken in his or her mother tongue. It was just for this short instant that the Babylonian confusion was overcome.
Instead of referring to the written source, artists were guided by contemporary models: Seated before a monumental architecture adorned with coloured impeded stones, the apostles have gath-
ered around the Mother of God in the centre of the composition. Mary is now shown with a white cloth beneath her mantle, which covers her head; the Maid of God has turned into a wedded woman. Whereas the Virgin Mary, crossing her arms before her chest and having an open book resting on her lap, is ever so complied by the Holy Spirit that she does not even need to look up to perceive the descending golden rays, Saint Peter on the other hand, kneeling on the left side of the miniature, gazes at the dove like most of the other apostles.
A repoussoir figure stands in the right foreground; the golden nimbus conceals his head. Judging from the physical weight of the figure it might be the stunned Saint John, who has nonetheless elevated his hands in dedicated prayer. But a young blond man is seated directly next to the Virgin, who could all the same be the favourite disciple. The number of heads rising behind the first row of apostles is not to determine. At least thirteen faces can be counted and it thus seems as if some further witnesses have been consorted with the apostles.
The Meeting at the Golden Gate for Matins of the Conception of the Virgin (fol. 42)
It is a notable particularity of our Book of Hours that it also includes the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin in the sequence of hours mixed with the hours of the Office of the Virgin.
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Like the Crucifixion for the Hours of the Holy Cross and Pentecost for the Hours of the Holy Spirit before, the Meeting at the Golden Gate is a common theme for the opening of the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin. It describes the miraculous conception of the Mother of God as it is told in the Legenda aura, the Golden Legend, an event depicted in many cycles of the Life of the Virgin: After the sacrifice of the aged couple Anne and Joachim is rejected by the temple, because their marriage was childless, Joachim joined the shepherds in the wilderness. While sacrificing he received a sign from God and was summoned to go to the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. At the same time, it was foretold to Anne that she should go to the same place. With the kiss that both shared at the spot, the virgin Mother of God was conceived without sin.
We do not perceive much of the gold at the gate: it is rather an entrance to an outer ward, which apparently connected with the massive round watchtower of the city wall by a fortified passage. We just see little of the actual town of Jerusalem; at least, the tower on the right might designate the dome of the temple of Jerusalem. The scene takes place on a stony path in the foreground. A narrow strip of meadow is shown above a small stone edge; behind it, there is broad ditch. It is particularly impressive how the superstructures from very different times of constructions
are picturesquely crowded together above the merlons of the round tower.
Anne approaches from the shadowed gate; a servant maid accompanies her. Joachim, coming from the right, meets them and kisses Anne on her temple, embraces her back with his right arm and rests his left hand on her womb as if he would insinuate her pregnancy. Her pregnancy might also be the reason why she gently places her husband’s hand on her womb. To not disturb this intimate meeting, Anne’s maid has turned away. She looks timidly and with a soft smile on her face to the left and thus outside of the miniature. Our master’s outstanding creative sense for composition is emphasised by her right forearm, which starts a dynamic movement prolonged by Anne’s lower right arm placed on her chest. The delightful colours underline this effect: Anne wears in contrast to Mary’s garment a shimmering blue robe and a violet mantle highlighted with liquid gold. She is surrounded by two distinct variations of red: the vermilion of the maid’s dress, shaded with a darker red and the carmine red of Joachim’s mantle. A bright green colour emphasises the maiden’s arm as well as her long undergarment, which reaches the ground. The boots of the old man are painted in a vivid orange and his brown chemise is again highlighted with liquid gold. The composition, which is repeated on fol. 26 in the Book of Hours
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HM 48 of the Huntington Library, is moved to the left and out of the vertical centre of the composition as if the artist wanted to optically associate the figure of Anne with the three-line initial of the Incipit. A particular compositional sensibility is conveyed in the corner motif behind Joachim, which results from the rubble of the city walls.
The Adoration of the Child for Prime (fol. 44)
The story of the infancy of Christ continues at Prime of the Virgin. By the time our manuscript was illuminated, artists already were used to illuminate the dark of the night with the divine light, which was brought by the newborn boy into the world. It is Christmas morning; the sky already starts to lighten up in the far distance along the horizon, whilst the interior of the stable, which is installed in classical architecture, still lies in darkness. The light, which illuminates Mary as bright as day, emanates from the newborn child, also floats towards Joseph and then towards the ox and the donkey, which are now visible more clearly. The unusual rectangular crib made of stone is obviously supposed to resemble an altar. The ox rests next to it, with its snout near the child, and the donkey gazes at the newborn through the twisted horns of the ox.
Joseph kneels frontally behind the long side of the crib, whereas Mary dominates almost the entire right side of the miniature. The Mother
of God has bound her hair in a white cloth, which apparently alludes to contemporary hairstyles with its elevated bun above her forehead. Her head is further accentuated by a pillar, which stands out from the architecture behind her. In the back of the right corner two shepherds push their way through the opening of a loggia, apparently without seeing much of the child. The scene of the Adoration of the Child on Christmas traditionally precedes the arrival of the shepherds in the iconographic sequence of French Books of Hours but already in Berry’s Belles Heures made before 1408, now conserved in the Cloisters, New York, we find an exception to the rule. When these exceptions appear, as in the work of the Limbourg brothers, they also reveal an element of unfamiliarity with the production of Books of Hours. In routine manuscripts as in our Book of Hours for the use of Tours or the manuscript in Wormsley, the shepherds are not show at Prime.205
The architecture in the background is defined by short and heavy columns, which are placed on high pedestals and allow the beholder to look outside as if he were wandering through a loggia. This disposition has its origins in Italy and apparently alludes to the account that the stable of Bethlehem was housed in the ruinous palace of King David as is related in legends also known in the North. The architectural frame of the miniature with its mannerisms of bulbously
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The miniature’s framing introduces yet another incredible element: a round laurel wreath encloses an escutcheon, as is common in Italian manuscripts. Today, only its original silver ground is preserved. Held up against the light it becomes obvious that the blazon has been scratched off. It has most probably once carried the black ermines of Brittany, which have been erased together with the French royal lilies on fol. 17/17v.
The Annunciation to the Shepherds for Terce (fol. 50)
The visual effect of nocturnal scenes shortly before dawn defines even more decisively the atmospheric setting of the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Bourdichon and Poyer were masters of such picturesque effects, which we find, for example, in the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany or in the Briçonnet Hours in Haarlem.206
Our master usually eschews the distortion of lighting effects in the depiction of this theme.207 In contrast to Bourdichon, with whom the Master of Claude of France worked but did not train, as well as in clearly distinguishable manner to Poyer, our master uses those bright light violet tones typical for the successors of Fouquet to attain nightly effects. Three men with a small
shepherd are shown on a narrow terrain in the foreground. Behind them is a green meadow, maybe even traversed by a small creek, the background of which is separated by a horizontal delimitation, probably signifying a path lined with bushes, and beyond that, rural buildings and a small hill.
Two bearded shepherds frame the composition in the lower foreground; they cast distinct shadows, because a divine light falls upon their arms and laps. They face each other. One of them is seated on a patch of grass; the other kneels on his right knee. Both men are dressed colourfully in blue and red, violet and orange with small white accents. A beardless boy has taken his seat in between. All three shepherds express their complete bewilderment by elevating their hands; the painter uses this expression to visualise a congenial compositional moment: four hands are raised above the heads of the shepherds as if they were to touch the horizon with their fingertips.
The nocturnal atmosphere demands a muted colour scheme. It includes a violet sky, an orange slate roof highlighted with liquid gold on one of the magnificent houses in the right background and shading with the extensive black in the colourful clothing of the two older shepherds. The modest scene becomes incredibly precious through its lighting, which highlights all things shaped golden columns contrasts with the palace depicted in the miniature, which has turned into ruins and serves now as a stable for the Holy family.
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in a sublime sparkle. This miniature for Terce is again framed by a hybrid columnar architectural design, which is surmounted not by a horizontal entablature but by volutes merging into each other as we have already encountered it at Prime for the Adoration of the Child.
The Adoration of the Magi for Sext (fol. 55)
Different elements already employed in the miniatures of the Meeting at the Golden Gate and of Christmas night seem to be assembled to form a majestic setting for the Adoration of the Magi, which takes place in the ruins of the palace of King David in Bethlehem as has the scene for Prime before. The upper edges of the building are shaded in a peculiar way and the small strip of sky shown appears all the more glaringly illuminated. This makes the figures appear as if they were illuminated by spotlights face on.
Joseph enters the scene through a portal of the impressive ruin in the left background; with his left hand he holds the crook of his outstretched arm. This gesture is otherwise unknown for the foster father but is reminiscent of the posture of the midwife whose arm or hand is represented in a paralyzed state in some Flemish Books of Hours because she did not believe in the virgin birth of Christ as the story accounts. As a secondary figure in the half shadow that is far too small, Joseph simply leads towards the splendid figure of the seated virgin.
The Mother of God is dressed in a violet robe with an exuberant blue mantle and now has bound her blond hair in a much smaller white cloth. Just seconds before she turned her feet towards the left, whereas she now bends towards the eldest king who is kneeling to the right. The infant, who is seated slightly off balance on his mother’s lap has also turned towards the old man and grabs the golden chalice, which is presented to him as a gift, with both of his tiny hands. To hand over his precious gift, the eldest king has kneeled down before the mother and chid in a manner comparable to that of the shepherds on the right in the composition of the miniature introducing the hour before. In this composition, however, the king lowers his arms because he is presenting the chalice filled with gold. This time, the crowns of the three kings are omitted; but the huge hat, which the eldest king has placed on the ground, is reminiscent of the hats adorned with crowns that were particularly favoured in the later fifteenth century.
The youngest king approaches the scene emphatically from the right. He presents a closed golden goblet with his right hand, whilst he has taken off his colourful hat, which stands out against the light blue sky. The third king, however, who often serves as a mediator between the main scene and the youngest of the three kings in other miniatures representing this subject, has been
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pushed away from the central group and into the background, where he joins Joseph. A massive pillar surmounts his shape.
This king seems to calmly wait his turn to adore the newborn; in this compositional context he is associated with the secondary figure of Joseph, who also somehow seems to have been developed in a subsequent stage of composition. Already the figure of the Virgin, whose posture was by no means created from the Mannerist composition often called figura serpentinata, seems to indicate that the painter in fact combined two different compositional models. The posture of the Virgin seems to be a merging between the drapery model of her legs and feet turned towards the left and her upper body facing the opposite direction. This supposition is sustained by the fact that the model of the upper body, together with a different alignment of the lower body, is already found in the London Add. ms. 35214. In this miniature, the main group of our composition is already prefigured. Joseph is missing in the London manuscript and only the figure of the Virgin, not her encounter with the eldest king, marks the centre of the composition. The second king is shifted slightly to the left and shown in a somewhat unorthodox posture, which the artist abandoned in our miniature. In both manuscripts, the main group including the eldest king remains unaltered, whereas the figure of the
youngest king, who leans towards the central composition from the right, is at least related.
The colouring prominently reveals the areas of the composition that the artist handled with greater confidence. This is most apparent in the figures of the Virgin and the eldest king, whereas the two assisting figures, which the illuminator seems to have placed on the left side of the miniature in order to obtain a more balanced composition, have been treated with less care. They do not play an active part in the depicted scene but rather serve to strengthen the compositional entrenchment of the seated figure of the Virgin. We might remember here that, according to everything we know, the Master of Claude of France started as an illuminator of border decorations and not as a proper miniaturist.
The Presentation in the Temple for None (fol. 60)
Opposed to most depictions of this traditional topic for None of the Office of the Virgin, the Virgin herself is the prominent centre of this composition following the common reading direction from left to right. This particularity connects our miniature to the historiated border of similar colouring in the New York prayer book on fol. 20, although there, it does not represent the Presentation in the Temple but the Circumcision celebrated on 1 January. The compositional emphasis of the Virgin in the border of the New York prayer book is not really appropriate for this
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Mary’s blue mantle forms the biggest unified coloured plane and dominates the centre of the composition. Her white veil is tightly wrapped around her head and matched the white colour of the altar cloth. Together with the sleeves of Simeon’s garment, softly touched with violet and highlighted with white, and the pale flesh tones of the infant and the central figures, they form another focus on the central action beneath the red of Simeon’s cap and shawl, which almost light up before the dark green canopy modelled with black colour. Joseph, the elderly woman who turns towards him and two other figures in the background are illuminated with a reduced colour palette, as well as the acolyte at the back narrow side of the altar, who carries an open book. This figure is also employed in another historiated border in the New York prayer book, this time representing the Presentation in the Temple, on fol. 21.
The long burning candle, which Joseph carries in his hand, associates another term used for the Marian feast on 2 February: Candle Mass. The incorrect transmission of the entire scene
into a liturgical ceremony contemporary to the time of origin of our miniature is emphasised by the acolyte carrying an open book. Instead of reaching out for the Child – which would have been the common pictorial scheme – Simeon suchlike bends over the Child with his hands folded in prayer as if the painter wanted to allude to the preparation of the sacrifice of the mass, when bread and wine as the incorporation of Christ are venerated by the priest like the physically presented divine infant in our miniature.
The Flight to Egypt for Vespers (fol. 65)
Instead of organising the compositional dynamics from left to right usually employed for depictions of the Flight to Egypt on recto pages to lead the movement out of the book, our miniature for Vespers is arranged in the opposite direction of reading images: in a bright landscape filled with light, far away from civilised habitation, the Holy family wanders along a slung bath, turning around humpy meadows and freshly greening trees.
Joseph, who now is clearly depicted in light for the first time in our Book of Hours, leads the little cortege. Common to sixteenth-century custom, he is represented as a rather young man with reddish-brown hair and beard. This is a remarkable characteristic since the foster father was preferably depicted as an old man with a snowy white beard following the traditional subject, since women were not allowed to assist the rite of circumcision. The Presentation in the Temple on the other hand is still a major Marian feast, celebrated on 2 February as our calendar incorporates it and also known as the Purification b. Mariæ, the purification of the Virgin.
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iconography of Saint Francis of Paula, especially in manuscript production in Tours. Jean Bourdichon always painted Joseph like this; his workshop was probably carried on by our master, who retained this older tradition in the New York prayer book of Claude of France. The tendency of representing Joseph as a young man apparently was not yet established, nor was it used in the other miniatures from Books of Hours painted by our master!208
Joseph wears a short red dress and high bucket top boots above grey trousers and has shouldered a long baton, although he does not carry the usual bundle on it. Our master however tends to omit this detail in his other miniatures representing the same subject. Joseph turns towards Mary, who is seated on the donkey led by him on a rope. The animal conveys an almost touching intelligence in his look and slowly trots forward, carrying the Mother of God in a yellow sidesaddle, whilst Mary wrapped her swaddled baby in her mantle.
The Coronation of the Virgin for Complines (fol. 71)
By the time of the early Bourdichon, for example, in the Vatican hours,209 the depiction of the assumpta – the Virgin ascending to Heaven alone – had replaced the more traditional theme of the Mary’s ascension and coronation in heaven. The Virgin is dressed in a white robe shaded with the
delicate violet that is so often used favourably by the Master of Claude of France. She appears before a golden ground in a mandorla surrounded by fiery red angel heads and a blue circle of fluffy clouds; Mary’s feet disappear behind the lower band of clouds. Of all the miniatures in the little Book of Hours, it was this one, which fascinated Reverend Dibdin so much that he decided to have it engraved and published.210
The one who transcended into heaven does not need assisting angels to elevate her. Still, two of them float at the upper corners of the miniature and pray. They are larger than the apparition of God in the vertex of the mandorla and are thus supposed to appear closer to the beholder. God in the form of Christ, a half-length figure, approaches the Mother of God and holds the crown into the golden aureole. Mary ascends in its mandorla shape to be crowned by him in a traditional sense. The composition had already been used, perhaps by our master, in the Hachette Hours and it is again repeated, this time somewhat clumsily, in the Book of Hours in Wormsley: In this miniature, the Virgin has stepped on the head of a seraph, which rests in the centre of a bank of clouds.211 The figure of God is omitted this time and also in the other.
The Coronation of the Virgin terminates the cycle of the hours of the Office of the Virgin
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The Penitential Psalms and the Litany
The custom of selecting seven of the 150 biblical psalms dates back to the age of the Church Fathers. On his deathbed, Saint Augustine is said to have carried them on his chest. In most Books of Hours, these seven psalms are placed in the middle of the book, mostly after a caesura in the collation. In our manuscript, they follow after the long portion of the various hours and appear in the last third of the book. They open an important text block, which was often conceived as a textual unit including the Penitential Psalms and the Litany and the Office of the Dead divided into Vespers of the Dead, the nocturnes of Matins and Lauds.
The selection of psalms did not vary: The Penitential Psalms were composed of psalms 1, 31(32), 37(38), 50(51), 101(102), 129(130) and 140(143).
In our Book of Hours, they open with the antiphone Ne reminiscaris, which is fully transcribed on fol. 85. It is directly followed, still on fol. 85, by the Litany, its beginning being marked only with a two-line initial since it was rarely read
alone but in connection with the entire text block. The litany follows a strict hierarchical structure, beginning with the Virgin and followed by the celestial order of angels, apostles and martyrs, confessors and finally the virgins. Their possible martyrdom did not matter in regard to their grouping in the sequence of saints. The selection of saints might always indicate a differentiation following the personal and regional attachments of the original owner of the book, as it was the case for our manuscript.
The Choice of Saints
The termination of the sequence of the apostles and the Disciples of Christ is astonishing in itself; Saint Matthew, who was appointed after the suicide of Judas, is followed by Barnabas, Luke the Evangelist and finally Saint Martial of Limoges, who only receives such an outstandingly high rank in the sequence of saints in a small selection Books of Hours produced in France.212 Also the beginning of the sequence of the martyrs is surprising because the first popes, Linus and Cletus, who are usually included, are omitted here. The list however mentions the plague saints Sebastian and Christopher, ranked very high. They appear even before the deacons Lawrence and Vincent. Thomas Becket, who is just rarely placed among those martyrs form ancient times, follows them. Parisian saints then define the sequence before the group of martyrs and the therein included Hours of the Holy Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit and Hours of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, which were to be prayed in the course of the day. All themes correspond with the traditional cycle of illustration but this conformity with traditional patterns is abandoned in the subsequent miniatures.
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terminates with Saint Eutropius of Saintes and Quentin of Saint-Quentin.
The list of confessors differs even more from the commonly found sequence. It starts with the Church Father Gregory the Great. Charlemagne and Saint Louis then slot in, before the list of the Church Fathers is completed. Remigius of Reims is closely connected with the French crown since the French coronation cult goes back to him. Saint Marcellus, who is honoured with a feast day on 3 November, points towards Parisian use, whereas Saint Martin points towards Tours and Saint Nicholas also inspired some regional cults in the Loire Valley. Saint Claude, who, however, is missing in the calendar, follows him, succeeded by Saint Anthony the Abbot, and at the bottom of the page, the Franciscan saint Anthony of Padua is differentiated by his toponym. Some ancient regional saints as Saint Eligius of Noyon and the eremite Saint Giles are also mixed in among the confessors, followed by Julian of Le Mans and René of Angers, the patron saint of Claude’s sister Renée. The list of holy monks is not completed systematically after the mentioning of Saint Benedict. Between him and his disciple Saint Maur appears the much later Saint Francis of Assisi. Then follows the plague saint, venerated in the later fifteenth century, Saint Roch and Saint Hubert, whose cult arose anew during the fifteenth century. Lubin of Chartres, Saint
Sulpice as another patron of Paris and Saint Leonard, the patron of the prisoners, terminate the list of confessors.
The considerable number of female saints is not surprising in a Book of Hours made for a woman. Naturally we search in vain for a female Saint Claude, because the future queen was named after a bishop saint and not after a female patron, as was her younger sister Renée. The selection seems somewhat trivial, if one does not wonder about the inclusion of Susanna from apocryphal Book of Daniel who is also included in the Hachette Hours. Susanna does not belong to the strict canon of saints but was included in several Books of Hours towards the end of the later Middle Ages, mostly in Books of Hours made for noble women such as the Berlin Hours of Mary of Burgundy and emperor Maximilian from the time around 1477 to 1481.
The final litanies are rather short and are written successively in the course of the lines, so that they do not take up more than two pages in the already densely written text. The litany is only personalised by the inclusion of the prayer Inclina aurem tuam derived from Lauds of the Office of the Dead. It includes the aforementioned invocation for Claude’s parents Louis XII and Anne of Brittany on fol. 89.
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Nathan Forces David to Do Penitence –for the Opening of the Penitential Psalms (fol. 78)
Since the authorship of most of the psalms is attributed to the biblical king David, the Penitential Psalms were commonly introduced by an image of David’s sin and penitence. Older generations of manuscript illuminators and patrons were satisfied with a representation of King David in the desert to which he withdrew. There, he often divested himself of his harp and crown to pray to an apparition of an wrathful God or to an angel with an ardent sword.213 Around 1500, perhaps under the influence of printed Books of Hours, entire image cycles were developed to illustrate the Penitential Psalms and very often, illuminated manuscripts picked just one, and less often two motifs to illustrate a double page at the Incipit.214
The miniature preceding the Penitential Psalms in the Hours of Claude of France is set in front of King David’s throne. Again, our illuminator renounces traditional compositional schemes. King David on his throne is seated neither diagonally, to talk to his subjects and advisors, nor frontally, as would have been common for Renaissance compositions with their sense of symmetry. His throne is depicted straight on, but shifted to the right and even overlapped by the miniature border– apparently the king’s space
came into conflict with the aged man standing straight before his throne.
Before a whole regiment of the royal council, which shimmers in the half-shade as it is familiar from Bourdichon’s or Colombe’s miniatures, a grave old man has approached from the left, bearded and wrapped in a sumptuous blue mantle, and raises the index finger of his left hand so fervently, that the king falls from his throne to the ground. The king’s crowned hat and his harp lie on the tiled floor in front of the throne steps. This follows the common iconography for images of David’s penitence. The king has kneeled down on them, his red robe contrasts beautifully with the blue dress of his prosecutor. David’s ermine collar signifies his royal dignity, his boots and the wreath around his waist shimmer in gold; violet trousers and a green robe courte are visible through the slit of his robe.
A prophet, who is called Nathan in the second Book of Kings (or the second Book of Samuel), has stepped before King David using the parable of the poor man, who only possessed one lamb, and the rich, who stole it from him, to accuse the king of having sinned with Bathsheba. The accusation virtually rushes the king down from his throne and forces him to acknowledge his sin and to be penitent. Only those who know the entire story can understand the complex subject of the miniature: David spied on the beautiful Bath-
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Albiac Hours (Private collection): Bathsheba
sheba at her bath, summoned her before him and together they conceived a child. To cover up his sin, David then sent for Bathsheba’s husband, the Hittite Uriah, who was serving the king loyally in war. After Uriah, honouring the soldiers’ codex, did not stay with his wife whilst being at David’s court, the king sent him with a letter to his captain Joab demanding him to have the cuckold placed in the field where he definitely would have to fall in battle. The prophet Nathan had understood the gruesome story of David’s guilt, and with his parable he forced the king’s retreat. This however does not mean that David would have been separated from Bathsheba forever; after his penitence in the desert he asked for her return. As the mother of King Salomon, she even became a central figure in the genealogy of Christ as it is accounted in Matthew 1.
A very different motif from this historical context is used in most elegant Books of Hours since the time of Jean Colombe’s Hours of Louis de Laval215 and our Liboron Hours made in Troyes,216 or even Poyer’s work.217 The Parisian painters of the later fifteenth century had already depicted tantalising nudes.218 In the circle of the 1520s workshop, for example, in the Albiac Hours,219 miniatures of this kind oscillate between erotic depiction of the bath and nude portraits of an astonishing directness. They are found in impressive manuscripts we presented in
our catalogues, and in the case of the fragment from the Hours of Louis XII painted by Bourdichon even convey a surprising verism that one might not exactly expect in religious books of this time.220
The Master of Claude of France was not unfamiliar with this iconography (we might cite the lascivious Bathsheba in the Book of Hours at the Arsenal library as one example) but he preferred to draw on the older tradition of the depiction of King David in the desert in our Book of Hours for the use of Tours.221 The motif selected for the
Hours of Claude of France is not surprising, since it was apparently not considered appropriate to ask approval of such open sexuality from a noble woman.
The Office of the Dead
Whereas the Hours of the Holy Cross and the Hours of the Holy Spirit as well as the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin contain a four-line stanza in verse, which resume the essentials of what had to be commemorated during the day, the Office of the Dead as well as the Office of the Virgin are composed primarily of biblical texts, mostly psalms. In the Office of the Dead, they are accompanied by nine lessons from the book of Job, which are interposed in the nocturnes of Matins. They are the actual characteristic text passages for this office. Variants of local or monastic uses can be distinguished here, as it is
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also possible for the Office of the Virgin. Our text again follows the use of Paris and associates the manuscript with the old royal capital in a time, when the court already resided in Tours, well away from Paris.
The Office of the Dead was supposed to be read during the night and in five sections distributed over the night. It was to be read at sunset, at the three nocturnes roughly around nine o’clock, at midnight, at three o’clock in the morning and finally at sunrise, as it is separated into Vespers, Matins with its three nocturnes and Lauds. The systematic interruption of sleep could of course not be expected of most laics, and so the office was more commonly read entirely as an elevating practice during prayer. This was probably also the main reason why the distinct hours of the Office were usually not distinguished with miniature pages in most manuscript and printed Books of Hours.
Our Office of the Dead is uniquely adapted at the end of Vespers and Lauds, on fol. 95 and fol. 119, since it includes the commemoration of the dead for Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, the aforementioned prayer uniquely created for the surviving daughters of the royal couple. And that only the older daughter Claude of France could have been the owner of our Book of Hours become apparent from the border decoration, which adorns our manuscript.
The passages from the Book of Job are only found in the nocturnes. However, the Office of the Dead was so strongly linked to the patient sufferer of the Old Testament that scenes from the life of Job became the common iconography for the illustration of the Office in the course of the fifteenth century.222 The standard was set by a single illustration, most commonly Job on the Dung Heap. The decision to introduce all three hours with a large miniature page and to select all three scenes from one single context posed some difficulties for the illuminator, since he had to create a cycle with scenes from the book of Job, which is a quite difficult task to accomplish even if he had to design only three miniatures. An Image of Job for Vespers (fol. 91)
The cycle starts with an almost unique depiction. Its iconography cannot be fully explained. A divine apparition marks the centre of the clear blue sky. God’s indulgence is apparently meant for the devout aged man and his considerably large farmhouse shown in the middle ground, whereas a second elderly man directly addresses the divine apparition in the form of Christ. He raises his right hand, whilst he grabs a bulging moneybag with the other. Both men are depicted as wealthy people but are all the same clearly distinguished by their appearances: the pious man, placed on the dexter, the better side of the image, wears a brown mantle above a two-part garment of violet
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The miniature could be understood as a visualisation of the prologue of the Book of Job. The sons of God have come before the lord. God asks Satan, who is also one of his children, about Job and after an argument leaves the pious to him in order to prove that at least this one will be indissolubly faithful to God. The Bible does not mention a bet between God and the Devil, but the account is all the same commonly understood in this way. The moneybag then would be a platitudinous sign for the bet. It might be all the same understood as Satan’s allegation that it would not be all too difficult for Job to be faithful to God since the Lord facilitated all of Job’s enterprises eagerly.
This coherent interpretation of the miniature, which would allow us to recognise a dispute over Job’s faith between God and Satan is contradicted by the following miniature, if we do not assume that our painter developed a brilliant and individual reading of the story of Job. In the Book of Hours at Wormsley Abbey, the
circumstances are reversed: The depiction of Job together with his – we would now say false – friend is the opening for Matins; it is lacking the presence of God over the righteous. However, the preceding Vespers was already introduced by an image of the patient sufferer in his misery.223
The scene is rather difficult to interpret and in the auction catalogue, Christopher de Hamel has proposed to see an offering of money to Job in this scene; an idea that has nothing at all to do with the biblical account of the story.
Job on the Dung Heap with His Friends, for Matins (fol. 97)
The misfortune, which Satan brought upon Job with God’s consent, is not depicted in the opening miniature of Matins of the Office of the Dead. It would have required a depiction of Job’s house, which collapsed during a banquet and killed his children, or a depiction of the theft of Job’s cattle leaving him ruined, as it is shown, for example, in a Book of Hours by Jean Pichore and his workshop, dated 1518 (cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III (2000), no. 25), in the third Hours of Philippa of Guelders (cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter V (1993), no. 33) or in the astonishing triptych painted by Bernard van Orley, now conserved at the Brussels Museum. Our miniature depicts Job, who is already suffering from leprosy, and thus follows the common iconography of images of Job in contemporary Books of Hours:224 Job and red cloth. His mantle reflects in shimmering gold. He is of a slim stature, bareheaded and barefoot. He devoutly lowers his head in prayer, whereas the other man, dressed in golden brown boots and a red cloth girdled with a golden band above a blue garment and a violet cloth around his head and shoulders, demands much more space for his upright standing figure.
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has been forced to leave his world and to vegetate on the dung heap dressed in dirty rags far outside the town, which is still visible in the background.
His friends pay him a visit; in the first scene they only look over his shoulder to realise that he still looks up in prayer and with relentless fidelity towards the golden rays of light symbolising the presence of God. Strangely, the second aged man appears again, whom we already encountered in the first miniature of the Office of the Dead. Again, he is depicted as the second main figure and it seems, as it was he who had sent Job into this misery. He himself is now looking upon the apparition of God’s presence, who does not show himself in person, to ensure that he sees everything that has happened. If this reading were correct, it would mean that Satan himself has consorted with Job’s friends. Even more, we could be inclined to believe that all of Job’s friends embody the enemies of God who socialise with the devil!
Job on the Dung Heap Discussing with His Friends for Lauds (fol. 112)
The conversation between Job and the prominent main figure, whose garments make him easily recognisable throughout the sequence, is carried on in the third miniature. Now, Job, dressed in rags, kneels on the grounds of a cemetery littered with human bones and a skull in between. A thick wall of treetops blocks any glimpse into the
far distance and there is no sign of God’s presence in the pale sky.
The leader of the group of friends talks with a peremptory and lecturing attitude to the silent sufferer, who desperately looks at him whilst the two other men silently listen to the conversation. Their dresses follow a similar conception as the one of the outstanding main figure, but they reappear in garments that consistently change in colour. Job has gained in stature in the course of the three miniatures. Although he is depicted in the humble position of a half-kneeling half naked figure, he however seems to have grown larger than his interlocutor, who at least symbolises the Devil’s thoughts.
All the creative potential of manuscript illuminators during these later periods becomes apparent in such compositions. We look back at the beautiful calendar miniatures of our Book of Hours and witness the imaginative strength of an artist who was satisfied with the recombination of different compositional patterns to represent traditional subjects such as the Adoration of the Magi, but who also discovers new artistic territories of an imaginary world, which had to process the turmoil of his time and the great crisis of spirituality after the outburst of the Reformation.
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Annotations
1 Dibdin I, 1817, pp. CLXXX-CLXXXII.
2 On the library of the Duke of Berry cf. the edition of the inventories by J. Guiffrey, Inventaires de Jean duc de Berry (1401-1416), 2 vols. (Paris, 1894-1896) and the contribution by Millard Meiss and Sharon Off, ‘The Bookkeeping of Robinet d’Estampes and the Chronology of Jean de Berry’s Manuscripts’, Art Bulletin LIII (1971), pp. 225-235 as well as Meiss’ volumes, 1967-1974.
3 Ex. cat. Greenwich (1991), pp. 112-114 et passim with further notes on Hugh Tait’s publications.
4 Vienna, Academy Gallery, cf. most recently Fritz Koreny with the assistance of Gabriele Bartz and Erwin Pokorny, Bosch. Die Zeichnungen. Werkstatt und Nachfolge bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), fig. on p. 45.
5 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, cod. vat. lat. 11245, cf. the commentary of the facsimile edition by Robert Moynihan, Offizium der heiligen Anna und des heiligen Frankziskus von Assisi (Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser, 1987).
6 London, British Library, Stowe 956, 40 x 35 mm. The name of the book refers to the English translation of the Penitential Psalms made by John Croke, cf. ex. cat. Greenwich (1991), no. V.43. Cf. also Janet Backhouse, ‘Illuminated Manuscripts and the Development of Miniature Portraiture’, in: Daniel Williams (ed.), Early Tudor England. Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 1-17 as well as James P. Carley, The Books of Henry VIII and his Wives (London: British Library, 2004), p. 23 with a reproduction of the binding and its big loop, fig. 10.
7 London, British Museum, 94.7.29, cf. ex. cat. Greenwich (1991), no. VII.16.
8 Cf. Tait’s description in the ex. cat. Greenwich (1991), p. 112-114.
9 Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 83, cf. the ex. cat. Enlumi-
nures italiennes. Chefs-d’Œuvre du Musée Condé (Paris: Somogy, 2000), no. 13 and most recently the facsimile edition with a commentary by Pier Luigi Mulas (Modena: Panini, 2009).
10 Pietro Toesca, Miniature di una Collezione Veneziana (Venice: G. Mardersteig, 1958), pp. 71-73 with fig. S. The dimensions of 60 by 26 millimetres given on page 71 are apparently wrong; the dimensions indicate a more probable size of 60 by 38 millimetres. The monograph on this booklet, which was apparently published in 1947, could not be consulted on this matter: Alessandro Cutolo, L’Officium parvum B.M.Virginis donato da Ludovico il Moro a Carlo VIII re di Francia (Milan: V. Hoepli, 1947). Toesca mentions that this publication offers a historical reconstruction of the circumstances how the book was made.
11 London, British Library, Add. ms. 34294, cf. ex. cat. Los Angeles/London (2003), no. 129 and the commentary in several volumes by Mark Evans, Bodo Brinkmann et al., The Sforza Hours. Add. ms. 34294 of the British Library (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1995).
12 Lortic signed the bookcase covered with black leather.
13 Henry Yates Thompson’s auction at Sotheby’s London, 22 June 1921, no. xciv, with a colour reproduction of the binding and a reproduction of a double page in black and white as the catalogue’s frontispiece.
14 London, British Museum, 5308.8 and 10; 79 x 59 mm and 81 x 60 mm. Also relevant are two leaves with designs for a matching case , cf. ex. cat The Age of Dürer and Holbein , ed. John Rowlands (London: British Museum publ., 1988), no. 207 and ex. cat. Greenwich (1991), no. VI.14.
15 E. W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1986), p. 315, note 50.
16 Abtshausen, duke of Württemberg, without number, cf. Decker-Hauff et al. (1988).
17 Cf. my commentaries of the facsimile editions: Das Florentiner Stundenbuch des Lorenzo de’ Medici. Codice Ashburnham 1874 der Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florenz (Lucerne:
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Faksimile-Verlag, 2005) and (with Henrik Engel) Das Stundenbuch des Bonaparte Ghislieri. Yates Thompson MS 29. The British Library, London (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 2008).
18 Cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter II (1990), no. 39 and the rich documentation in the figures of our catalogue no. 67: Unterwegs zur Renaissance (2012), no. 11. The manuscript measures just about 57 by 41 millimetres, its justification 35 by 21 millimetres.
19 De Hamel (2005), p. 13, fig. 4c. It was later sold at Sotheby’s London, Rothermere sale, 26 March 1942.
20 Cf. the numerous examples in the ex. cat. Paris 1400 , ed. Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye (Paris: Fayard, 2004) that attest to the rich production in Paris at the time.
21 Cf. Seling (1980), vol. I, p. 52 who notes in connection to the family altar of Albrecht V: “Da wir es mit einer ungemarkten Arbeit zu tun haben, wie das bei Hofaufträgen sehr häufig vorkommt …”
22 Cf. especially Seling (1980), vol. I, pl. II opposed to p. 56 and Krempel (1967).
23 Munich, BSB, Clm 23640. The facsimile edition was printed in Lachen in 1986 with a commentary volume by Rupert Hacker et al., Das Gebetbuch Kurfürst Maximilians I. von Baden. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 23640 . Cf. especially the essay by Lorenz Seelig on pages 137-174 and most recently the ex. cat. AußenAnsichten. Bucheinbände aus 1000 Jahren aus den Beständen der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München , ed. Bettina Wagner (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), no. 46 (description by Béatrice Hernad).
24 Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI (1993/94), no. 68.
25 Such as the back of a cameo with an image of the Virgin Mary (ex. cat. Essen (1988), no. 373 and colour pl. 75) made by Ottavio Miseroni around 1600.
26 Ex. cat. Essen (1988), no. 442, pl. 92.
27 One most recent example is the study by Reinsburg (2012).
28 Another example is Cynthia Brown’s The Queen’s
Library: Image-Making at the Court of Anne of Brittany, 14771514 . Not only does the author not mention the prayer books of the queen. She does not even fully include the entire known inventory. It is all the more striking that her assistance is more often required when a facsimile commentary requires a historic coating (cf. the bibliography at the end of this book).
29 Kraus (1974), p. 11; Sterling (1975), p. 8.
30 “Incline your ear to hear our prayers that we send to you soliciting your mercy on our knees, so that the soul of your servant King Louis, my father, and the soul of your servant Queen Anne, my mother, and the souls of all the deceased believers, whom you ordered to depart from this world might be through you settled in the empire of peace and light and by you commanded to keep company with your saints.” Sterling (1975), p. 8 also mentioned this particular prayer.
31 Of the numerous examples we just cite a few famous cases here, among them Berry’s Belles Heures in New York, The Cloisters Collection, Acc. no. 54.1.1., fol. 121 and the Bedford Hours (London, British Library, Add. MS 18550), fol. 198v: … ut a(n)i(m)am famuli tui et animas famulorum tuorum famularumq(ue) tuarum … On both manuscripts see the facsimile editions and my commentaries, Les Belles Heures du duc de Berry (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 2003) and Das Bedford-Stundenbuch (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 2006). In addition, Berry’s Petites Heures from the 1370s (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 18014), the Egerton Book of Hours in London from around 1410 that was later owned by René d’Anjou (British Library, MS Egerton 1070) and the Anjou Book of Hours from the Rohan workshop for René (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1156A). (Kind assistance provided by Christine Seidel.).
32 Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 9474 (cf. Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 164), Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1370 (cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 35), Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 10532 (cf. Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 163); cf. also the descriptions in Leroquais (1927).
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33 In manuscripts such as a Book of Hours probably produced in Nantes around 1460 (Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, ms. lat. 33, fol. 165v/166) this prayer follows the Inclina aurem tuam … (cf. Livre d’heures on the bibliologie médiévale website).
34 See most recently the monograph on Claude by Pigaillem (2006) and the dictionary entry by Wilson-Chevalier (2007) as well as the contributions by Cynthia Brown in the commentary volumes of the facsimile editions of 2010 and 2012.
35 This daughter of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII, who lived through the numerous turbulences of the century until 1575, inspired far more historic research than her older sister, cf. Fontana (1889-1898), Rodocanachi (1896), Bonet-Maury (1891), Webb (1969) and Blaisdell (1972).
36 Modena, Biblioteca Estense, a .U.2.28. Already Carta and Bertoni (1920), p. 12, noticed this prayer. Cf. also Orth (1998), p. 171.
37 There is a facsimile edition of the primer (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1998) with a commentary volume by Ernesto Milano and Myra Orth. The production of the facsimile is connected with a rather dramatic story: Some time the between the photographing of the manuscript and the printing of the facsimile edition the original was stolen from an exhibition on Montecassino in 1994.
38 “Lord, who you have told us to honour our father and our mother, have mercy on the souls of my father and my mother and forgive them their sins and let me see myself with them in the joy of eternal light.”
39 Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 65. From the abundant literature we only mention the still outstanding work of Millard Meiss, The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (New York/London: Phaidon Press, 1974), passim.
40 König (2001), pp. 138-146.
41 Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1159, cf. Leroquais (1927), no. 24, especially p. 76, cf. also Harthan (1977), pp. 118-121.
42 London, Victoria & Albert Museum, ms. Salting 1222, fol. 223-225v, cf. Watson (2011), vol. I., no. 53, pp. 300-311, especially p. 303 for the prayer on fol. 223-225v. Joris Corin Heyder presented an annotated translation of the text in his unpublished master thesis on the Book of Hours of Marguerite of Foix (Berlin, 2010); cf. also Harthan 1977, pp. 122-125.
43 Cf. most recently ex. cat. France 1500 (Paris: Éditions de la RMN, 2010/11), no. 50, fig. 37 on p. 99; an overview of the Books of Hours made for the Breton ducal court was assembled by John Harthan in his book of 1987 (pp. 116-131), who knows the Book of Hours of Marguerite de Foix very well, having been keeper of the library in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and is equally acquainted with the primer of Claude of France in Cambridge.
44 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, ms. 159. Cf. most recently the facsimile edition (Lucerne: Quarternio Verlag, 2012) with a commentary by Cynthia Brown, Eberhard König and Roger S. Wieck.
45 “I am your servant and son of your maiden” (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 50, fol 31/31v). There exists a facsimile edition and commentary volume by Roger S. Wieck (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1999).
46 Cf. ex. cat. Mechelen/Malines (2005), no. 83, p. 244 ff.
47 Paris, BnF, ms. NAL 3120. Cf. Porcher (1961), pp. 115-117; Reynaud (1973); Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 143; Nettekoven (2004), p. 46 ff. and her catalogue entry in the annex.
48 Paris, BnF, ms. NAL 3027. Cf. Leroquais (1943), no. 1, pp. 1-5 with pls. XVII-XXVIII. In addition to several of my own contributions cf. also Avril and Reynaud (1993), p. 417 and no. 238).
49 Nantes, Médiathèque, ms. 18, cf. Booton (2009), p. 253.
50 Sterling (1990), p. 404.
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51 Cf. the contradictory opinions in König (1992) and in Avril and Renyaud (1993). Cf. most recently Zöhl (2004).
52 This assumption is also advanced in the commentary volume of the facsimile edition of the Hours of Christoph I of Baden, cf. König (1978).
53 Cf. the adorable exhibition in the Louvre (Paris, 2012).
54 Avril and Reynaud (1993), p. 417.
55 Booton (2009), p. 252. She owes the knowledge of the manuscript to Cynthia Brown.
56 Private collection, cf. König (2001).
57 Abtshausen, Duke of Württemberg, without no., cf. Decker-Hauff et al. (1988).
58 Laurin – Guilloux – Buffetaud auction, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 4 December 2000, lot 25.
59 Among the manuscripts made for the king is also an early chief work of Jean Bourdichon (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 1370), that is, as our manuscript, made for the use of Paris, cf. Leroquais (1927), vol. I, pp. 189-191, and most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 35.
60 Apart from the world famous Book of Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux painted by Jean Pucelle in the 1320s (New York, the Cloisters Collection, Inv. no. 54.1.2, cf. the commentary of the facsimile edition by Barbara Drake Boehm et al. [Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1998-2000]) we might mention Walters 84 from the third quarter of the fourteenth century, cf. ex. cat. Baltimore (1988), no. 12 and fig. 39. Heavily cut at the edges, it measures 59 by 45 millimetres. Furthermore we can cite the early fourteenth-century ms. 45 of French origin in the Library of Congress in Washington, measuring 66 by 48 millimetres (the so-called Hours of Jeanne of Naples or Hours of Edith Rosenwald), cf. Svato Schutzner, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Books in the Library of Congress. A Descriptive Catalogue, vol. I.: Bibles, Liturgy, Books of Hours (Washington: Libr. of Congress, 1989), pp. 283-268; several figs. in H.
P. Kraus, In Retrospect. A Catalogue of 100 Outstanding Manuscripts (New York: H. P. Kraus, 1978), no 41, p. 120 with fig. 121 and most recently cf. Vision of a Collector. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress (Washington: Libr. of Congress, 1991), no. 1, pp. 3-5 with pl. 1.
61 Cf. the discussion by Myra Orth in Decker-Hauff et al. (1988), pp. 85-91.
62 Fully reproduced in Sterling (1975), figs. 1-129. It is mentioned in the entire literature on Master of Claude of France. Cf. still as ms. 8 of the Alexandre P. Rosenberg collection in Plummer and Clark (1982), no. 127, p. 99 ff. Cf. most recently the facsimile edition with a commentary by Wieck et al. (2010).
63 Cf. the Résumé in the form of a catalogue entry in Decker-Hauff et al. (1988), pp. 98-101.
64 The strength (of belief and action) doubles the hope for eternal life in an astonishing analogy to Luther’s Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott (Our god is a castle of strength).
65 Sterling (1975), p. 10.
66 This observation plays an important role in the constantly growing attribution of manuscript destined for the young dauphin, cf. for example Patricia Stirnemann who even considers the Bedford Hours to be a commission of Louis of Guyenne.
67 Since everything in a Book of Hours aims for the forgiveness of sins and redemption, both occurrences of wings are better not associated with the soul that wishes for wings to enter heaven.
68 Tervarent (1958), col. 9-15 names velocity, poverty despite of genius, time, glory, victory, peace, virtues and vices, spirit, ratio, love, fortune, vengeance, melancholy, the Liberal Arts, astrology (only as one attribute amongst others that can be given to a personification of every quality). The metaphoric signification of paired wings is almost never investigated.
69 Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 2228. Bénart, Louanges de Charles VIII , fol. 1, cf, Le Fur (2001), fig. 16. Cf. also the colour
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reproduction in Colette Beaune, with a preface by François Avril, Le Miroir du Pouvoir. Les manuscrits des rois de France au Moyen Age (Paris: Bibl. de l’image, 1997), p. 156.
70 The sign of the three ostrich feathers was already given to him upon his birth. It is used on the reverse of the desco da parto of 1449, which shows the Trionfo della fama on the front (New York, Metropolitan Museum). The painting is attributed to Giovanni di ser Giovanni, called lo Scheggia (1406-1486).
71 Paris, BnF, ms. NAL 584. Bartolomeo Sacci called Il Palatina, De optimo cive with a dedication to Lorenzo, cf. ex. cat. All’ombra del Lauro. Documenti Librari della Cultura in Età Laurenziana , (Florence: Silvana Editoriale, 1992), no. 2.88, pp. 103-105. The exhibition was shown in the Florentine Biblioteca Laurenziana.
72 Tervarent (1958), col. 35 ff. and col. 309. One reference to this interpretation also known north of the Alps can be found in the decoration of the tomb of William of Orange (1533-1584) in Delft. Here the feathers are represented together with the balance of Justice. Cf. Tervarent (1964), col. 431.
73 From the André Hachette collection, cf. Manuscrits du XIIe au XVIe siècle. Miniatures. Imprimés des XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: Giraud-Badin, 1953, no. 26) with reproduction. Cf. also L. Witten, Cat. 4 , no. 4 as the “Hours of Anne of Montmorency”; Wieck (2004) and more extensively Wieck (2010), with figs. 18, 21 and 23.
74 Later, Renée joined the sisterhood of the Franciscan tertiaries. She came to Ferrara with the cord.
75 At the train station of Vannes, for example, a mosaic as high as the wall shows the Breton duchess that became queen of France with this motto.
76 At the time, it was Beate Braun-Niehr who transcribed the passage from Saint John’s gospel. She was working with the Hours of Mary Stuart in such a manner.
77 Ms. lat. 3120 was believed to be the smallest known manuscript when it came to the National Library in Paris
together with the Boisrouvray collection and was catalogued by Jean Porcher in 1961.
78 Cf. the research of Michael Jones and most recently Thibault (1991) as well as the list in Booton (2009), pp. 252-262; Cynthia Brown’s incomplete list in her publication of 2011, pp. 307-310 falls behind the more extensive earlier listings.
79 Cf. for example Virgina Reinsburg in her exceptionally poorly informed book of 2011.
80 Philadelphia, Free Library, Lewis M. 11.15a. Cf. Hofmann (2004), pp. 25-26 and p. 166. Most recently cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 2.
81 Pierre-Gilles Girault, ‘Job es ses amis. Une miniatures attribuée à Jean Bourdichon’, Cahiers du château et des musées de Blois 36 (Dec. 2005), pp. 6-17 and id., ‘Jean Bourdichon, Job et ses amis’ in Catalogue des peintures du musée du château de Blois. XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, ed. Hélène LébédelCarbonnet (Blois/Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2008), p. 32. Most recently cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 79.
82 On the text block with three large and 17 small miniatures cf. Sam Fogg, Medieval Manuscripts, Catalogue 14 (London: S. Fogg, 1991), no. 39 (ex Jérome-Pichon) with reference to Richard Day, Master Drawings and Manuscripts, 1480-1880 (London: R. Day 1990), no. 2.
83 Cf. no 1 in the previously cited catalogue by Richard Day (cf. note 82) with some inconsistent remarks on a written notes, which Jean Porcher exchanged with Paul Durrieu, in 1955, and which apparently later came in the possession of François Avril.
84 Sotheby’s London, 18 July 1991, lot 155. The appearance of the book led Christopher de Hamel to compile an overview on miniature Books of Hours. He mentions the Arthur Houghton Collection of Miniature Books, which was sold at Christies on 5 December 1979. He also remembers the three smallest books known to Leroquais (1927): Paris, BnF, ms. NAL 884, lat. 10555 and lat. 1361. Before the discovery of the manuscript sold in 1991 he believed the
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Add. ms. 58280 of the British Library to be the smallest known Book of Hours, cf. Christopher de Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Phaidon Press, 1986), p. 172 with a reproduction in original size. In the reprint of 1995, this illustration was replaced by a reproduction from the manuscript sold at Sotheby’s (p. 176).
85 Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 919, cf. Millard Meiss and Marcel Thomas, Les Grandes Heures du Duc de Berry (Paris: Draeger frères; Vilo, 1971).
86 Cf. the examples given in Brown (2011).
87 Cf. Pierre Champion, La librairie de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Champion, 1910), p. 51.
88 Avril and Renyaud explain this approach as a maxim in their ex. cat. of 1993, p. 14 in contrast to Plummer and Clark in their ex. cat. of 1982.
89 This goes so far as to call one early fifteenth-century illuminator the Tenschert Master, cf. Eva Lindqvist Sandgren, The Book of Hours of Jeanne Ravenelle and the Parisian Illumination around 1400 (Uppsala: University Press, 2002), passim.
90 For example the case of the so-called Master of Adelaïde of Savoy, named after a Book of Hours in Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 74 that owes his name to the binding made for the daughter of the Sun King, Louis XIV, as well as the so-called Guise Master (Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms. 60), named for similar reasons. Both times, the naming of the artists leads to confusion: it is especially drastic in the case of an artist associated by his name with Savoy, who should better be called the “Master of Poitiers 30”, after a missal for the use of Poitiers in the municipal library there. The same is true for an artist, who did not live in the time of Guise but painted the so-called Guise Hours. He should be named instead for his masterpiece, the Hours of Guy de Laval in the collection of Renate König in Mülheim. Cf. on this artist most recently König (2006) as well as Bartz (2004) and her contribution to Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III (2000), no. 6. Cf. also her dissertation, which will be published soon.
91 Not entirely painted by one single hand are the miniatures in the Psalter of Jean of Berry (Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 13091), which are attributed to the sculptor André Beauneveu by a contemporary inscription. This is not just true for the miniatures accompanying the text, but also for the sequence of prophets and apostles preceding the psalter, cf. Meiss 1967, passim and the useful colour reproductions of the sequence in the Bruges exhibition catalogue by Susie Nash et al., ‘No equal in any land’. André Beauneveu. Artist to the Courts of France and Flanders (London: Paul Holberton Publ., 2007), pp. 108-131.
92 In the case of Jean Fouquet, François Avril went so far as to withdraw the only manuscript ascribed to Fouquet by a nearly contemporary notice; instead, he ascribed Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 247, the first volume of the Antiquités Judaïques by Flavius Josephus, to the newly defined Master of the Munich Boccaccio. It seems significant that Nicholas Herman, for example, writes of Fouquet’s “principal continuateur”, but assumes that this follower died, as Fouquet himself, in the early 1480s (cf. Herman [2011], p. 215 and p. 216). In the case of Jean Pichore, I am not fully sure if the documented name should not be given to the Petrarch Master instead, cf. Avril in the ex. cat. of 1993 in contrast to our Leuchtendes Mittelalter IV (1992); cf. also Zöhl (2004).
93 Nicole Reynaud introduced the name in 1975; a short synthesis can be found in the ex. cat. of 1993, pp. 392398. The outstanding work of this style is a Book of Hours, which we will present in our next catalogue on manuscript illumination in the provinces of France.
94 Sterling (1975), cf. also Avril and Reynaud (1993), pp. 319-323.
95 See note 52 above.
96 These cuttings and some more, still unknown to Sterling, are now attributed to the Master of Claude of France himself: Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, M. 94 and M. 95.
Cf. Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 176 and Milvia Bollatio et al., Ridono le carte. Medieval and Renaissance Illuminations,
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BEL, Catalogue 2 (London/Lugano: B.E.L., 1998), nos. 16 and 17, pp. 48-55 with comparisons (Sandra Hindman).
97 Paris, Arsenal, ms. 291. Cf. Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 277 and most recently cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 86.
98 The master is mentioned in relation to the Petrarch manuscript in Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 225 (no. 140 in the ex. cat). The manuscript shows a miniature depicting Louis XII, the king without a son, who points, while talking to Lady Fortune, towards his wife Anne of Brittany and their daughter Claude. Her name is also listed in an overview of portrait medallions made by Jean Thinel who created an iconography of the royal family. She is just mentioned briefly in connection with the female terracotta bust of Louise of Savoy (no. 89).
99 We still wait for the printing of Myra Orth’s survey on French manuscript illumination in the sixteenth century that is supposed to be published by Harvey Miller, London.
100 Sterling adopts this attribution from Kraus catalogue of 1974, p. 11.
101 Wieck (2010), p. 136; however, the characterisation creates certain doubts regarding both the analysis of the collation and the facsimile: if, for example, fol. 4v and 5, which do not fit together, should form a well co-ordinated double page.
102 The literature was based for a long time on Auguste Bernard, Geoffroy Tory, peintre et graveur, premier imprimeur royal, réformateur de l’othographie sous François Ier…Deuxième edition (Paris: E. Tross, 1865); the first edition is also available on the Internet. Cf. most recently the ex. cat. Ecouen (2011) and our Horae catalogue of 2003, with a contribution on Tory’s printed Books of Hours and their succession by Caroline Zöhl, cf. vol. III, pp. 1082-1177.
103 Cf. also her contribution in the ex. cat. London and New York (1983), p. 148 with figs. 17 and 18, among them a page covered with an almost full-page border which depicts a floral still life.
104 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Lat. 614 = a .U.2.28. The manuscript was already fully reproduced by Carta and Bertoni (1909) and second edition (1920). Still, Backhouse did not notice the prayer for the souls of the royal couple on fol. 16 and fol. 16v. Cf. since then the facsimile edition with the commentary by Milano and Orth (1998) and the CD with a digital facsimile by Bini (2004).
105 Sterling (1975), p. 23 already made this observation; the astonishing compositional analogy led Wieck (2010) to reproduce the famous model in colour (fig. 7). On Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks cf. most recently Vincent Delieuvin in the ex. cat. Paris (2012), no. 73; in this short notice, there was no space to mention the New York book of prayers in relation with the early history of the painting.
106 No. 127; by then the ms. 8 of the Rosenberg collection.
107 I still remember the book from my visit to Alexandre P. Rosenberg and his wife, whom I remember gratefully.
108 It is still one of the most important stolen works of art; cf. the exquisite facsimile and the commentary volume by Ernesto Milano and Myra D. Orth (1998).
109 Milano and Orth (1998); Roger S. Wieck and Cynthia Brown (2010).
110 This reminds me of François Avril’s attribution of Fouquet’s œuvre to two different hands, cf. Avril in the ex. cat. Paris (2003). In this case, although two further works are ascribed to the so-called Master of the Munich Boccaccio, the Pieta at Nouans-les-Fontaines is still considered to be a work of Jean Fouquet, even when it carries all the characteristics claimed to be distinctive features of the work of the other.
111 See note 73 above.
112 The best account is given in the ex. cat. Tours (2012).
113 Today, historians like to forget the work of David MacGibbon, who, in 1933, contributed the first English
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study on Bourdichon and enriched our knowledge on this master with several newly discovered records from the archives.
114 Girault (1995).
115 The entire reconstruction of the master’s œuvre given by Hofmann (2004) is based on that idea.
116 London, British Library, Yates Thompson ms. 5. Cf. Backhouse (1983) and most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 66.
117 Cf. most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 62 and Hofmann (2004), pp. 11-14 and pp. 181-184.
118 Cf. most recently ex. cat. Paris (2010/11), no. 58; Hofmann (2004), passim and Zöhl (2004), passim.
119 Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 174, cf. most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 110 and Hofmann (2004), p. 38 ff. and pp. 142-145.
120 Decker-Hauff et al. (1988).
121 Leproux (2011).
122 We might add that our series Leuchtendes Mittelalter also contributed to this development. We introduced works of Poyer of an outstanding importance, such as one of his most beautiful works, the Credo of Pierre Louis de Valtan made for the Catholic Queen Isabella of Castile (Leuchtendes Mittelalter II , no. 57), cf. also Hofmann (2004), passim, as well as the Book of Hours presented in Leuchtendes Mittelalter V (1993), nos. 27 and 28.
123 Cf. our volume Leuchtendes Mittelalter IV (1992) and the related passages in Avril and Reynaud (1993) as well as the dissertation of Caroline Zöhl (2004).
124 Cf. ex. cat. New York (1982), no. 127.
125 Cf. ex. cat. New York (1982), no. 128.
126 Cf. Parkes (1979), pp. 195-201.
127 Cf. Parkes (1979), pp. 195-201; Wieck (2010), p. 141.
128 Cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 18.
129 In this regard it might be noted that we presented just recently a book of hours bearing the signature of a Jacquette de la Barre. It was illuminated by the Mazarine Master, cf. Eberhard König, Das Pariser Stundenbuch an der Schwelle zum 15. Jahrhundert. Die Heures de Joffroy und weitere unbekannte Handschriften (Illuminationen 14, Studien und Monographien), ed. Heribert Tenschert (Ramsen: Bibermühle, 2011), no. 5.
130 Cf. Victor Leroquais, Les Pontificaux des Bibliothèques publiques de France, 4 vols. (Paris/Mâcon: impr. Protat frères, 1937), vol. 2, pp. 168 ff. and pl. CXXVII ff. in vol. 4.
131 This attribution is today generally accepted, cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter I (1989), no. 72 and, with more illustrations, Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III (2000), no. 27. A miniature showing the Flight to Egypt, which was painted in a closely related style as offered for sale as lot 7 in the Catalogue no. 27 of William Schab, New York in 1960, cf. Monuements of Book Illustration, Early Printing and Manuscripts, fig. on p. 13.
132 Avril and Reynaud (1993), pp. 319-323 with nos. 176-178. Backhouse (1985), fig. 52 shows the miniature for the Office of the Dead because it is one of the few examples showing the dead riding a bull. Cf. also the colour reproduction in her album of 2004.
133 Leuchtendes Mittelalter I (1989), no. 72, and Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III (2000), no. 27. Cf. also Wieck (2010), p. 142. See also the Book of Hours, ms. 38 at Wormsley Abbey, which was discussed by Roger S. Wieck, ‘The Claude Master’s Hours’ in The Wormsley Library. A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty. K.B.E., ed. H. George Fletcher et al. (London: Maggs Bros., 1999), no. 21 and earlier cf. Sotheby’s London, 11. Dec. 1984, lot 63, with further illustrations.
134 Wieck (2010), p. 72.
135 Wieck (2010), pp. 138-143.
136 Hofmann (2004), passim. This discussion circles
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around the manuscript Walters 430 in Baltimore (cf. Hofmann (2004), pp. 81-83), the Add. ms. 35315 in London (cf. Hofmann (2004), pp. 103-106) and the Book of Hours in the municipal library at Lyons, ms. 1558 (cf. Hofmann (2004), pp. 117-121).
137 Cf. Orth and Milano (1998), pp. 204-210 and Wieck (2010), pp. 138-143.
138 Cf. Herman (2011), note 33.
139 On the last endpaper, as in every of these manuscripts, Sir Frederick Madden (Keeper of Manuscripts since 1837) registers in his characteristic handwriting that the manuscript was bought for the library on 2 February 1852; this was the result of a not always friendly deal with the book dealers J. and W. Boone, 129. New Bond Street, London. In a contemporary note, the librarian comments pejoratively on the Jewish dealer, stating that the price, already lowered, was still outrageous. The Boones finally got £3000 in this transaction.
140 Herman (2011); cf. also the ex. cat. Les Enluminures du Louvre. Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. François Avril et al. (Paris: Somogy, 2011), no 95 (the Adoration of the Magi, accompanied by a very good summary written by Maxence Hermant, still without a reference to the Master of Claude of France), as well as the ex. cat. Los Angeles and London (2005).
141 Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 886, cf. Avril and Renyaud (1993), no. 165. The attribution in Hermant (2012), p. 264.
142 Cf. ex. cat. Dix siècles d’enluminure italienne (VIe-XVIe siècles), ed. François Avril (Paris: Bibl. nationale, 1984) and Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 163.
143 On this painter cf. the book by Teresa d’Urso (2007).
144 Both researchers contributed their findings to the conference Tours 1500: Art et société à Tours au début de la Renaissance, held in Tours in 2012.
145 Wieck (2010), p. 71.
146 Cf. most recently Eberhard König, Le dialogue des creatures. 1482. übersetzt von Colard Mansion für Lodewijk van Gruuthuse (= Illuminationen 17, Studien und Monographien , ed. Heribert Tenschert, Bibermühle: Antiquariat Tenschert, 2012), passim.
147 See note 133 above.
148 D’Urso (2007), p. 256 and p. 258, assumes that the manuscript was commissioned by Louise of Savoy. It could also have been a gift of Francis I to his sister Margaret on the occasion of her wedding with the Duke of Alençon, as Hermant supposed in the ex. cat. Tours (2012), p. 266.
149 Bourdichon’s chief panel painting is the Triptych with the Virgin Mary, today in the charterhouse of San Marino in Naples (the triptych was shown in the Museo di Capodimonte for a long time). The diptych of the blessing Christ and the Virgin Mary on the other hand, which was recently acquired by the Museum of Tours, was not painted by Bourdichon (cf. my contribution ‘Peintre de l’entourage de Jean Fouquet (Maître du Boccace de Munich?), Le Christ bénissant. La Vierge en oraison’ in the ex. cat. Paris (2010/11), no. 128, pp. 262-265 or ‘Follower of Jean Fouquet (probably the Master of the Munich Boccaccio), Diptych of Christ Blessing and the Virgin in Prayer’ in the ex. cat. Chicago (2011), no. 52, pp. 118-119 respectively, in contrast to the contribution by Pascale Charron and Pierre-Gilles Girault in the ex. cat. Tours (2012), pp. 154-173. On Poyer’s panel painting cf. most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 62 and no. 68. Controversially attributed to one or the other is the Entombment of Christ in the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Gonnesse, which was shown as a work of Bourdichon in Paris in 2010 (as no. 48), cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 27. On these questions cf. also Hofmann (2004), passim.
150 This circumstance is opposed by an important documentary source that we already mentioned: In 1497, the historic figure of Poyer received 152 livres for 23 minia-
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tures and 271 borders commissioned by Anne of Brittany. The fragment in Philadelphia (Free Library, Lewis M. 11. 15a), which is today connected to this commission, again does not have any border decoration, cf. Hofmann (2004), pp. 25-26 and p. 166 and most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 2.
151 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 495, cf. most recently ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 110.
152 On the Grandes Heures (Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 9474) cf. Avril and Reynaud (1993), no. 164; Delisle (1913) and most recently Miro (2008-2010), as well as the ex. cat. Paris (2010/11), no. 50.
153 Cf. Herman (2010), p. 215 ff.
154 On this manuscript cf. Backhouse in the ex. cat. London/New York (1983), no. 21, by that time still called the Hours of Henry VII. Cf. also ex. cat. Los Angeles/ London (2005) and ex. cat. Paris (2011), no. 95; Chicago (2011), nos. 40-41 and most recently the ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 72, pp. 296-305.
155 On this phenomenon cf. more extensively Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij (1996).
156 Cf. the fragment published by Wieck (2010), fig. 11 from a Book of Hours (Morgan 1051). Altogether, three such leaves are conserved at the Pierpont Morgan Library, cf. also Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij (1996), p. 18 and figs. 7 ff.
157 For the attribution cf. Wieck (2004), see note 73 above. The manuscript measures 102 by 60 millimetres.
158 Wieck (2010), figs. 18 and 19.
159 Cf. most recently the contribution by Valérie Guéant in the ex. cat. Tours (2012), pp. 258-260 with numerous references.
160 By that time, a missal in for volumes was illuminated for Domenico della Rovere, a cardinal nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. The volumes are today conserved at the State Archive at Turin (ms. JB II, 2-4) and at the Pierpont
Morgan Library (M. 306). In Mirella Levi d’Ancona’s contribution in 1959, the multi-volume missal marked the substantial point of departure for the following literature on the newly defined master.
161 Avril and Reynaud (1993), pp. 290-292; cf. also Avril (2003), no. 53.
162 Paris, Arsenal Library, ms. 432 and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 348; cf. ex. cat. Tours (2012), nos. 84-85.
163 Cf. most recently Nicole Reynaud (2006); Sterling (1975), fig. 14 reproduced Fouquet’s Pieta from the Hours of Etienne Chevalier, today as a single leaf in Chantilly.
164 Wieck (2010), fig. 7 reproduces Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks at the Louvre.
165 See note 73 above.
166 Cf. Backhouse’s album of 2004, fig. 106 showing David with the head of Goliath.
167 Wieck (2010), p. 141.
168 Wieck (2010), p. 139; ex. cat. Baltimore (2009), fig. 4; Watson (2012), II, no. 132 with a reasonable dating into the third decade of the sixteenth century.
169 Cf. the short biography by Nicholas Herman in the ex. cat. Tours (2012), pp. 247-251.
170 Pierre-Gilles Girault, ‘Peintres et artistes royaux à Tours vers 1500 après les archives notariales’, in Les ouvriers tous excelens et parfois. Les artistes au service des Valois. The publication will appear shortly; Maxence Hermant already reluctantly communicated this finding in the ex. cat. Tours (2012), p. 288 and note 16.
171 Cf. on the following for example Farge (1985) and Orth (1993).
172 Cf. Pigaillem (2006), Cynthia Brown’s contributions and the encyclopaedia entry by Wilson-Chevalier (2007).
173 Marie-Elisabeth Antoine kindly pointed this out.
174 Geneva, Bibl. publ. et universitaire, fr. 74.
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175 Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 25138; a transcription and translation of the text are given in Brown (2010).
176 Paris, Société des Manuscrits des Assureurs français, ms. SMAF 85.1; this text includes the earliest surviving dedication that addresses Claude as queen.
177 Cf. Brown (2010), p. 36 ff.
178 Paris, Arsenal Library, ms. 5116; cf. Graville (1965); Müller (2004), pp. 191-204. The dedication poem and its translation in Brown (2010), p. 38 ff.
179 Paris, BnF, ms. fr. 2253; cf. Müller (2003). The dedication poem and its translation in Brown (2010), p. 40.
180 Several good example of such pious literature can be found in the ex. cat. Mechelen (2007).
181 Orth (1998), p. 191.
182 Cf. for example Heller (1971) und Roekler (1972) as well as the writings of Blaisdell (1972) and (the same author) as Webb (1969).
183 Bonaini (1859), Fontana (1889-1899), Rodocanachi (1898) and Gil (1990).
184 Cf. Blaisdell (1972).
185 At this point, historiography sometimes reaches the level of poor novels as, for example, in Hannula (1999) in the chapter “Renée, Duchess of Ferrara”, pp. 157-162.
186 Cf. Bonet-Maury (1891).
187 Milano (1998), passim.
188 Heller (1971) and Orth (1993).
189 Paris, Arsenal Library, ms. 5096; cf. Orth (1993).
190 Tavarent (1958), col. 358-362. Astronomy and astrology, urania, melancholia, prudentia, opportunity, fortune and opinion, universe, theology, time, temperantia; finally also purely decorative.
191 Cf. Myra Orth’s various studies on this subject, as well as Robert Schindler’s contribution in the ex. cat. Baltimore (2009) and my own remarks in König (2012), pp. 47-52.
192 Ex. cat. Baltimore (1988), fig. 17 and pl. 15.
193 Cf. on this subject our catalogue in three volumes Horae (2003).
194 Acta Sanctorum Junii, Tomus Quintus (Paris and Rome: V. Palmé, 1867), p. 57: “SS. Primus et Januaria in Oriente”.
195 See note 54 above.
196 Ex. cat. Baltimore (1988), fig. 17 on p. 50.
197 In this context we could like to refer to Stephanie Buck’s enlightening remarks in Holbein am Hofe Heinrichs VIII (Berlin: Reimer, 1997), passim.
198 As for example in Walters 449, cf. ex. cat. Baltimore (1988), pl. 15.
199 Catalogue of the Most Valuable, Interesting and Highly Important Library of the Late George Daniel Eff. of Canonbury, Sotheby’s London (20 July. 1864), lat. 1178, p. 127; the London catalogue pp. 254-5 does not mention the signs of the zodiac.
200 Cf. Wieck (2010), fig. 12 and p. 142.
201 A particularly prominent example can be studied in the facsimile-edition of the Guémadeuc Book of Hours of 2000, cf. also the commentary volume by König (2001).
202 For the Berlin Book of Hours, cf. Eberhard König with contributions by Fedja Anzelewsky, Bodo Brinkmann and Frauke Steenbock, Das Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund und Kaiser Maximilians (Lachen am Zürichsee: Belser, 1998); a magnificent example for typological pictorial systems – although placing the old testamentary images in the head miniatures – is Douce 122. Cf. Eberhard König with a contribution by Peter Kidd, Das Flämische Stundenbuch der Maria von Medici, Ms. Douce 122, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Lucerne: Quaternio-Verlag, 2011), pp. 7-122 and pp. 201-213.
203 Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III (2000), no. 27, fig. on p. 461.
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204 Cf. most recently the ex. cat. Tours (2012), no. 62 with further literature, and Hofmann (2004), p. 181-184.
205 Fig. Sotheby’s London (11 December 1984), lot 63.
206 Cf. most recently the ex. cat. Paris (2010/11), nos. 50 and 58, figs. on p. 136 and 149.
207 As, for example, in our Book of Hours for the use of Tours, where one of the shepherds is depicted as an inverted main figure, cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III , no. 27, fig. 463, and in the Wormsley manuscript, cf. the figure in Sotheby’s London (11 Dec. 1984), lot 63.
208 Cf. again our Tours book of hours in Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III , no. 27, fig. 458.
209 Cf. my commentary volume: Das vatikanische Stundenbuch Jean Bourdichons. Cod. vat. lat. 3781. Einführung (Codices e vaticanis selecti quam similime expressi iussu Ioannis Pauli PP II consilio et opera curatorum bibliothecae Vaticanae Volumen LXVII) (Stuttgart/Zürich: Belser, 1984).
My attribution to Bourdichon, founded amongst others on Limousin’s appreciation of 1954, was long ignored by French and American scholars. Jane Rosenthal even wrote her own commentary volume for the American public, which absurdly focussed on explaining to the buyers of the facsimile how inferior the quality of the Vatican miniatures is. Nicholas Herman fortunately reintegrated the Vatican book of hours into Bourdichon’s œuvre, as for example in his talk at the Berlin conference in June 2012.
210 Dibdin I (1817), p. clxxii.
211 Flechter (1999), see note 133 above, fig. on p. 60.
212 On the appearance of Saint Martial at this position cf. my commentary volume (together with Gerhard Schramm), Das Stundenbuch des Markgrafen Christoph I. von Baden. Codex Durlach 1 der Badischen Landesbibliothek, ed. Elmar Mittler und Gerhard Schramm (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller, 1978), passim.
213 In our book of hours for the use of Tours (Leuch-
tendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III , no. 27, fig. on p. 461), the angel carries a lily whilst negotiating the recovery of god’s mercy.
214 Cf. the commentary on the Karlsruhe book of hours of Christoph I of Baden (1978), see note 212 above.
215 Paris, BnF, ms. lat. 920, fol. 158. cf. Leroquais (1927), pl. LXXVII; cf. also the upcoming Berlin dissertation by Christine Seidel.
216 Leuchtendes Mittelalter V, no. 23, fig. on p. 397.
217 Leuchtendes Mittelalter V, no. 28, fig. on p. 487. Cf. also the comparable motif in the book of hours Walters 449, fol. 76, cf. the ex. cat. Baltimore (2009), no. 12.
218 As for example in the work of the Gaguin Master, cf. Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III , no. 22, fig. on p. 348, after the removal of a somewhat prudish “panties painting”.
219 Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge VI , no. 28, fig. on p. 481.
220 Cf. most recently the ex. cat. Tours (2012), its cover design and the exhibition poster showing the leaf today conserved at the J. Paul Getty Musuem in Los Angeles.
221 Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III, no 27, fig. on p. 461.
222 On the illustrations of the Office of the Dead cf. my contribution, with Gabriele Bartz, ‘Die Illustration des Totenoffiziums in Stundenbüchern’, in Im Angesicht des Todes. Ein interdisziplinäres Kolloquium , 2 vols. (Pietas Liturgica 3-4), ed. Hansjakob Becker et al. (St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 487-528.
223 Cf. the auction catalogue Sotheby’s London (11 Dec. 1984), no. 63, with figs. of the openings of Vespers and Matins.
224 Cf. again our Book of Hours for the use of Tours in Leuchtendes Mittelalter. Neue Folge III , no. 27, fig. on p. 465.
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Résumé in Form of a Catalogue Entry
The Hours of Claude of France
Book of Hours, Horae B.M.V. for the use of Paris.
Manuscript in Latin written in black ink, liquid gold and red ink on parchment, in an Antiqua book script with Spanish and Greek mottos in the border decorations. Tours, around 1522/23. Illuminated by the Master of Claude of France (Eloy Tassart?)
Thirty-nine pictures on twenty-seven pages, fifteen of them framed by an architectural border, amongst them two full-page paintings and thirteen large head miniatures above four lines of text with three-line initials; in three instances just two-line initials. Twelve calendar pages with depictions of the occupations of the months in full width and half the length of the ruled space, accompanied by twelve medallions showing the signs of the zodiac; foursided border decorations on an amethyst-coloured ground with the cords of Saint Francis, unknotted ropes and white and golden banderols carrying mottos in French, Greek and Spanish. All text pages are decorated with four-sided borders, which are of the same design on recto and verso, with armillary spheres, the capital letter S, sometimes as a closed “ferme S” (standing for fermesse, Old French for “firmness”), mostly star-strewn on a dark blue ground, some of them showing paired wings (standing for the L of Louis [ailes] or an allegorical connotation) or paired golden ostrich feathers referring to the heraldry of the Medici family (possibly signifying justice); on some pages also chaplets, so-called rosaries: among the decorated
text pages one leaf with a medallion enclosing the initial of Queen Claude and a royal blazon that was later erased. Two five-line and three four-line initials in the style of the decorated initial of the miniature pages in bright acanthus décor on a liquid gold ground, one of them decorated with the dove of the Holy Spirit. Smaller illuminated initials including the two-line KL initials of the calendar painted in gold on uncontoured transverse rectangular grounds, alternating in blue and the dark red of the rubrics: beginning of the psalms and comparable texts open with two-line initials, psalm verses in the course of the lines begin with one-line initials; line fillers almost exclusively in the calendar and the litany, accompanied by rubrics in gold, blue and red. Distinctive script in capital letters in the first lines of important Incipits, partly also in the rubrics. Majuscules are not coloured in yellow wash.
Technical Notes
The manuscript is complete, with 121 leaves of vellum, of which the first and the last leaf, as well as fol. 13, 90 and 96 are blank and without border decoration; free endpapers in modern parchment, decorated with the fleurde-lis in leaf gold; an additional modern endpaper in the back. The collation was destroyed during the rebinding in the nineteenth century. The extremely fine quality of the vellum makes it impossible to discern hair and flesh sides of the leaves. Hans P. Kraus and John Kebabian inscribed their initials in pencil and the date XII/68 on the back free endpaper together with the following collation: 16 , 410 , 56 , 610 , 76 , 810-1, 94 , 10-158 , 168-2 , as well as the note that the leaves 1, 14, 97 and 121 were blank; they count 121 leaves
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altogether (the same collation was published in Kraus [1974], p. 111). They included the blank folio before the calendar as fol. 1, and counted one leaf less than the manuscript actually contains; we start with the first calendar page as fol. 1. It is impossible to reconstruct how this arbitrary collation was assembled; it does not fit conclusively with the sequence of image and text. The inconclusiveness begins with the fact that a blank folio and the months until May should form the first quire, followed by another quire including not only the rest of the calendar from June onwards, but another blank folio and finally the beginning of Matins of the Office of the Virgin with its miniature on a folio that may have been inserted. Also highly unusual is the constant shift between ternions and quinions – especially favoured in Italian manuscripts – whereas French manuscripts were usually arranged in quaternions. The irregularities in quires 8 and 9 do not make any real sense. The collation might have been inscribed simply to reassure potential buyers. The distribution of the text does not indicate any partition of the text block with the help of significant caesurae. It is notable that blank pages without border decoration do not mark caesurae throughout the manuscript. No catchwords.
Extremely miniaturised format (in-32°!): 84 x 55 mm (ruled space ca. 60 x 32 mm); during the last restoration strips of 5 millimetre width were attached to the gutter. Ruling of twenty-two lines on the calendar and text pages; in contrast to the French custom, the ruling is almost invisible.
Brilliantly preserved, without any losses.
The Binding
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the vellum leaves of the manuscript were interposed with paper leaves measuring 111 by 71 millimetres in order to preserve the painting and bound in blue morocco with a gilded dentelle; the paper flyleaves and the pastedown endpapers were coated with red silk. Since the context of the facing pages could no longer be seen and the metal colours had left slight stains on the inserted paper leaves, they were recently removed from the otherwise perfectly preserved manuscript.
Recently bound in a superb and unique jewelled binding, probably made in Prague in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The boards were covered with green silk and parchment flyleaves, both strewn with golden lilies, were added by James Brockman.
The cover plates are inlaid with slightly emerging medallions in the centre. They show the Adoration of the Child and the Resurrection, representing the Christian high feasts of Christmas and Easter, made in coloured email cloisonné, and the cover spine is decorated with the Instruments of the Passion. Five raised bands on the spine, in niello repoussé, imitate the threads of the bookbinder. Hinges connect the spine and cover plates; the headbands are covered with a semi-circle on both ends. The covers are framed by borders in niello decoration, fitted with diamonds in a rectangular cut. Twenty diamonds on each cover plate, together with four larger stones in the corners of each cover and four smaller diamonds
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on the spine as well as on the plates above the headbands and two additional stones on each clasp make a total of fifty-six diamonds embellishing the gold binding. Although the binding is unmarked, this gorgeous binding suggests that it was commissioned by the Imperial court.
Comparable works of goldsmithery are usually made of gilded silver plates. There is only one in full gold, formerly in our possession, which is so closely related that it could have been made in the same workshop: two originally upright cover plates with the IHS sign and the pentagram of the Hebraic name of God were apparently reworked by their master to enclose a copy of the Vonn Miniatur gemahltes Büchlein die 12 maltzeitten Christi sampt der Schriefft written in a horizontal format (see Leuchtendes Mittelalter VI [1993/94], no. 68). The rededication of that very binding, which was initially conceived as a goldsmith’s work for a conservative catholic commission, for protestant devotional literature could have happened in Prague during the reign of the Winter King, Elector Palatine Frederick V, in 1619/20.
The binding used for our manuscript, which was illuminated a century earlier, might have originated during the lifetime of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague; it was followed by the smoother and more formally developed binding of the Twelve Meals in 1619, the year of the upheaval in Prague.
Provenance
The coats of arms on fol. 17v and, beneath the Christmas miniature, on fol. 44 have been erased. The main colours
blue and silver are preserved; they indicate France and Brittany. In the identical prayers on fol. 89, 95 and fol. 119 one of the children of the royal couple Louis XII and Anne of Brittany intercedes for redemption of the souls of their parents who died in 1514 and 1515 respectively. The golden C beneath the crown on fol. 17v proves that only Claude, crowned in 1517, could have been the original owner of the Book of Hours, whereas there is no trace of her sister Renée in the manuscript.
Anne of Brittany’s motto non Mudera, derived from her mother Marguerite de Foix, who insisted on the Spanish part of her genealogy and who passed on Spanish customs to her daughter, was also carried on by Claude. The motto is connected with additional motifs in the border decorations, as well as with references to Queen Claude; all borders of the text pages are framed by the Franciscan cord, which forms the main decorative feature along with the Latin and Greek motto firmitas eternitatis spem duplicat and ′H ΒΕΒΑΙΩΤHΣ ΤΟΥ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΥ ΔΙΡΛΑΣΙΑΖΕΙ ΤHΝ ′ΕΛΡΙΔΑ. They are supplemented by armillary spheres carrying the initial letters of the names of the months; paired wings and ostrich feathers; the letter S shown in its closed form, to be read as ferme S or fermesse, meaning firmness; and chaplets, preferably made of coral, meaning rosaries, are also added.
Claude of France (1499-1524) must have commissioned the Book of Hours towards the end of her rather short life, during the time of her marriage to Francis I and after her coronation. Our manuscript stands in strong opposition to the much smaller New York prayer book
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Morgan 1166, painted in the same workshop, which was probably initially planned as a complete Book of Hours, although only the first and the last quires were written and then unified by ingenious illuminations. Both manuscripts were probably preceded by the artistically weaker Book of Hours from the Hachette collection, today in an Irish private collection, which is decorated with comparable heraldic devices. The primer of Renée of France in Modena was definitely illuminated earlier.
For the later history of the book see the contribution by Heribert Tenschert in the Appendix.
Text and Illustrations
fol. 1: Calendar in Latin, not including a feast for every day. The Golden Number, the letter for Sunday, A and the feasts in gold; the letters for Sunday, b-g, and common feast days of the saints in black. The choice of saints (except Dominicus) is exclusively Franciscan with Saint Bernardino of Siena (20 May), the Translatio Francisci (25 May), Saint Claire (12 August) and the feast day of Saint Francis (4 October). It also includes feast days for Parisian saints, including Saint Genoveva (3 January), Saint Denis (9 October) and Saint Marcellus (3 November). Some of the saints, such as the rarely depicted Saint Ianuaria (21 June), are known from Italian calendars. The patron saints of the royal family are not included, with the exception of Saint Anne and Saint Louis.
Miniatures of the occupations of the months occupy half of the ruled space and the medal-
lions painted in blue camaïeu show the signs of the zodiac in the outer border of the recto pages. fol. 13r-14r blank.
fol. 14v: Office of the Virgin following the use of Paris (secundum vsum ecclesiæ parisiensis), with interposed Hours of the Holy Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit and Hours of the Conception of the Virgin: Matins of the Office of the Virgin (fol. 15), including three full nocturnes to be read on different days of the week (fol. 16v, 20v and 24) with the Annunciation (fol. 14v). All other miniatures are placed on recto pages facing a blank verso page: full page miniature of the Visitation for Lauds of the Virgin (fol. 30, Incipit on fol. 30v); fol. 37 with a four-side border but only one line including the rubric, fol. 37v blank. Form this point, all pictures are head miniatures with four lines of the Incipit: the Crucifixion for Matins of the Hours of the Holy Cross (fol. 38); Pentecost for Matins of the Hours of the Holy Spirit (fol. 40), the Meeting at the Golden Gate for Matins of the Hours of the Conception of the Virgin (fol. 42); The Adoration of the Child for Prime of the Office of the Virgin (fol. 44); the Annunciation to the Shepherds for Terce (fol. 50); the Adoration of the Magi for Sext (fol. 55), the Presentation in the Temple for None (fol. 60); the Flight to Egypt for Vespers (fol. 65); the Coronation of the Virgin ascended into heaven for Compline (fol. 70).
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fol. 78: Nathan and David for the opening of the Penitential Psalms, followed by the Litany (fol. 86); the choice of saints including Claudius and Renatus is more strongly personalised; it is terminated by the prayer Inclina aurem tuam with the intercession on behalf of the souls of the parents, King Louis XII and Queen Anne of Brittany (fol. 89).
fol. 91: Office of the Dead for the use of Paris including three miniatures: Scene form the book of Job for Vespers of the Office of the Dead (fol. 91; terminating with the prayer Inclina aurem tuam with the intercession on behalf of the souls of the parents, King Louis and Queen Anne of Brittany (fol. 95). – The Friends Visit Job on the Dung Heap for Matins (fol. 97); fol. 111/v blank. – Job on the Dung Heap with His Friends for Lauds (fol. 112), again terminating with the prayer Inclina aurem tuam with the intercession on behalf of the souls of the parents, King Louis and Queen Anne of Brittany (fol. 119).
fol. 119v: end of the text.
Script and Decoration
The codex is a chief work of the Italianate Humanistic writing culture, which was adapted in France shortly after 1500, also called Roman script. Majuscules form a script of distinction and further characteristics, such as the eschewal of a visible ruling of the writing space, testify to the vivid influence of Italian book culture. The
letters, very homogeneous in their line structure, allow the extreme miniaturisation of the script that distinguishes several manuscripts that were made at the court of Anne of Brittany. In contrast to Anne’s Très Petites Heures, nouv. acq. lat. 3120 of the Parisian national library, painted by the Master of the Apocalypse Rose of SainteChapelle, and Claude’s New York prayer book Morgan 1166 painted by our master, the script in this Book of Hours is more easily readable due to a more generous line spacing.
The traditional attribution of comparable manuscripts to Geoffroy Tory, that Kraus in 1974 and Sterling in 1975 insisted on, is rejected today. If however one wished to return to this idea, our Book of Hours would be a brilliant candidate for an autograph work, since it achieved a distinct clarity comparable to the best manuscripts associated with the 1520s group. Tory later established this kind of script in printing.
The border decorations in the two manuscripts made for Queen Claude differ notably from the otherwise common floral borders from Tours, but they are also very different from each other: Whereas the New York prayer book is illuminated with splendid historiated borders, the decoration of our Book of Hours painted on a violet ground, which is probably supposed to be reminiscent of the colour of amethysts, develops an outstanding sense for ornamentation espe-
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cially prepared to fit the qualities of its owner. Claude is thereby identified as a tertiary of Saint Francis: firm, devout, intelligent and righteous. With the exception of the cords and ropes she is only characterised by motifs that are essentially atypical for women.
The illustration of the Book of Hours might have been planned even more sumptuously at the beginning. After a double page with a fullpage miniature and a large initial opening the Incipit was created for the Matins of the Office of the Virgin, the scribe left a blank page for the opening of Lauds. As a result of a third change in the layout, he started to inscribe Incipits for head miniatures on recto pages and repeatedly left the preceding verso blank. It is plausible that the manuscript was initially designed for a juxtaposition of a full-page miniature and another head miniature introducing the Incipit.
Golden architectural borders frame all miniatures. They are either represented as aedicules supported by pilasters or pillars flank them, surmounted by hybrid arches. These constructions lead to a strong conceptual contrast to the very different historiated border of the text pages in the New York prayer book; this has often been noted as a deplorable imbalance in the literature. This contrast is however omitted in our Book of Hours, since the miniature pages are isolated and only once face a text page, at the beginning of
Matins of the Office of the Virgin. The delicate shading in a subtle violet moreover achieves an aesthetic union. Our master started shortly after 1500 as an illuminator specialised in border decorations in the workshop of Jean Bourdichon. In neither of the two manuscripts made for Claude of France do we find much evidence of his two outstanding specialities: Neither the botanically correct flowering branches on gold ground, so characteristic for the manuscript production in Tours, nor the candelabra borders developed in Italy appear in one of the two manuscripts.
The Master of Claude of France: Eloy Tassart
Based on the two manuscripts reunited in Hans P. Kraus’ sales rooms in 1974, Charles Sterling defined an illuminator, whom he called the Master of Claude of France, in his publication of 1975. He accepted only the New York prayer book as the single-handed work of this master and attributed our Book of Hours to a younger and more developed follower, who worked after the plans of the older master. This conception is today obsolete. All attributions to the Master of Claude of France are based on ourBook of Hours, whereas the numerous attributions of border decorations in manuscripts with miniatures by Bourdichon, beginning with the Hours of Frederick of Aragon, lat. 10532, which was
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Focussed on the idea that both prayer books of Claude of France were made around 1515/17 and probably also due to the fact that Sterling reproduced all miniature pages in black and white, but not a single text page, even Myra Orth and all subsequent scholarship did not notice the epochal difference between the two manuscripts made for the queen. At the same time, the Modena primer of Renée of France, Claude’s sister, was misjudged almost without exception: The miniatures were either revoked from the master’s work or dated far too late, when in fact the little booklet decorated with floral branches seems to be the master’s earliest accepted work as far as figural miniatures are concerned; but maybe the small Book of Hours today in an Irish private collection, which formerly belonged to André Hachette, precedes it. The heraldry of the gold ground borders carrying the motto non Mudera, the armillary spheres and the paired wings in the decoration of the Book of Hours might indicate this; on the other hand, the painting seems rather rough, which would contradict the attribution to our master. The manuscript would, however, prove how difficult it must have been for this painter specialised in border decoration to adapt to the challenge of miniature painting, before he
had mastered controlling the production of illuminated manuscripts.
The richly decorated prayer book Morgan 1166 and our Book of Hours are separated by the epochal rupture that Myra Orth had introduced into the discussion with her reflexions on evangelical tendencies in the 1520s. She could not, however, link them to the manuscripts made for Claude of France. The clarity and severity of our Book of Hours separates it from the old faith in images that had triumphed in prayer books for a last time. Our manuscript already respires the ideas of evangelical tendencies at the French court on the early 1520s, as promoted by Margaret of Angoulême, who is better known as Margaret of Navarra.
Pierre-Gilles Girault referred to the painter Eloy Tassart in several lectures and in an essay, which is scheduled for publication in 2012. This painter was active as the court painter of Queen Claude between 1521 and 1523. The tendency of dating our prayer books to the second decade of the sixteenth century made him hesitate to connect the name conclusively with the Master of Claude of France. Our observations help to enhance the weight of the newly discovered name, because our Book of Hours might just have been painted during the time when Eloy Tassart was working as Claude’s illuminator in Tours around 1523, rather than two years earlier. painted before 1503, must make a detour across the materialthat is attributed to the same master on the grounds of his miniatures.
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