Book of Hours (Use of Paris)

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New York City, NY, Pierpont Morgan Library, Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts (Set 28), no. 31 [M. 1021.31]

General Information

Title Book of Hours (Use of Paris)
Material Parchment
Place of Origin France

Original Condition

Page Height at least 190 mm
Page Width at least 130 mm
Height of Written Area 107 mm
Width of Written Area 68 mm
Number of Columns 1
Number of Lines 15

Book Decoration and Musical Notation

Description

Marginal rinceaux and painted line fillers, smallish acanthus leaves on miniature pages only. Margins also include gold trefoil and red, blue, and green flowers growing on the rinceaux. Rinceaux often seems to “sprout” out of the text, usually from a single gold initial or line-filler. Borders on recto and verso are mirrored for efficiency. Some leaves show a gold ring motif among the rinceaux. Miniatures with gold U-borders with flowers/ leaves in red and blue. Continental color palette: Blues, purples, jewel tone & continental design: botanical, leafy, organic. Miniature composition similar to Bedford Master Workshop, Dunois Master Workshop, and occasionally elements of Boucicaut Master Workshop (as suggested by Sotheby’s). Judith Oliver in 1985: “These compositions are very similar in all their details to those of the Bedford atelier.”

History

Origin

Written in northern France in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, for the Use of Paris. Use of Paris is indicated by the Calendar and liturgical variants in Matins of the Hours of the Virgin, and Vespers and Matins in the Office of the Dead.

Provenance

Broken by Otto F. Ege before 1950. Many text leaves used as No. 31 in his "Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts" portfolios, forty of which were assembled in the 1950s. The miniatures were distributed by other means.

Bibliography

  • Gwara, Scott. Otto Ege's Manuscripts (Cayce, SC : De Brailes Publishing, 2013), pp. 128-129.

  • Oliver, Judy. Manuscripts Sacred and Secular (Boston: Endowment for Biblical Research, 1985), pp. 58-59 (no. 97, figs. 20-23).