May 20, 2008
Visual Interlude: Prayer Book of Claude de France
Above is a spread from the Prayer Book of Claude de France, which went on view today at the Morgan Library & Museum. Here's some info from the museum:
The Morgan Library & Museum presents a special exhibition of an extremely rare Renaissance illuminated manuscript, the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France, created around the time of her coronation in 1517. It is the most important single illuminated manuscript acquired by the Morgan in the last twenty-five years and on view in the East Room of the historic McKim building.
The tiny, jewel-like book, measuring just 2 3/4 by 2 inches, is richly illustrated with 132 scenes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and numerous saints. The work was created by an artist known as the Master of Claude de France and can be characterized as the pinnacle of delicacy in Renaissance illumination. The artist, named after this prayer book and a companion manuscript, was active in Tours during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Barely a dozen of his works survive.
This trip down art history lane affords me the opportunity to recommend a book I received as a Christmas gift and have savored poring over since: Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (Yale University Press). (I know, one is French and the other English...) I discovered the book by reading Ben Schwarz's extremely favorable review in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic. An excerpt from that piece:
The study of Books of Hours was confined mostly to art historians—the finest volumes, sumptuously illuminated and hand-scripted, contain some of the supreme paintings of the late Middle Ages. But in a feat of inspired scholarship, Duffy has turned to the very features of these books that have rankled those who study them as works of art: the jottings in the margins and on the flyleaves made by their owners, hitherto regarded as defacements at worst and proof of provenance at best. He’s examined the marginalia of a small number of the extant Books of Hours made for English use (some 800 handwritten volumes survive, along with a few thousand early printed editions), and has discovered “a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.”