Book of Hours (Use of Paris)
Office of the Dead, Matins - 3rd Nocturn. Includes verses from Psalm 39.
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General Information
Original Condition
Current Condition
Book Decoration and Musical Notation
Marginal rinceaux and painted line fillers, smallish acanthusleaves on miniature pages only. Margins also include goldtrefoil and red, blue, and green flowers growing on therinceaux. Rinceaux often seems to “sprout” out of the text,usually from a single gold initial or line-filler. Borders onrecto and verso are mirrored for efficiency. Some leavesshow a gold ring motif among the rinceaux. Miniatures withgold U-borders with flowers/ leaves in red and blue.Continental color palette: Blues, purples, jewel tone &continental design: botanical, leafy, organic. Miniaturecomposition similar to Bedford Master Workshop, DunoisMaster Workshop, and occasionally elements of BoucicautMaster Workshop (as suggested by Sotheby’s). JudithOliver in 1985: “These compositions are very similar in alltheir details to those of the Bedford atelier.”
History
Written in northern France in the second quarter of thefifteenth century, for the Use of Paris. Use of Paris isindicated by the Calendar and liturgical variants in Matins ofthe Hours of the Virgin, and Vespers and Matins in theOffice of the Dead.
Broken by Otto F. Ege before 1950. Many text leaves usedas No. 31 in his "Fifty Original Leaves from MedievalManuscripts" portfolios, forty of which were assembled inthe 1950s. The miniatures were distributed by other means.
Bibliography
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Gwara, Scott. Otto Ege's Manuscripts (Cayce, SC : DeBrailes Publishing, 2013), pp. 128-129.
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Oliver, Judy. Manuscripts Sacred and Secular (Boston:Endowment for Biblical Research, 1985), pp. 58-59 (no. 97,figs. 20-23).