Somebody spent a very long time on this page. The border alone holds hundreds of gold ivy leaves, each laid on separately and finished with a pen-drawn stem, and inside the border sits a Crucifixion painted in the manner of a Paris Book of Hours of about 1400. The Virgin swoons and John holds her up. The Magdalene kneels at the foot of the cross with her hair down and a handkerchief to her face. A knight on a white horse looks up at Christ, and behind them all a landscape of green hills runs off to a walled town. The page was painted in France late in the nineteenth century, on vellum and with real gold. It is a nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval devotional page.
A Book of Hours was a private prayer book, made to order, and around 1400 the Paris workshops that produced them were doing some of the best painting in Europe. The style is easy to recognize once you have seen it: sprays of gold ivy on hairline tendrils, bars of pink and blue acanthus on burnished gold, a miniature under a round arch, a large initial in blue and gold to open the text. Our artist reproduced all of it. The gold on the initial and the bars is leaf, laid down and burnished, and it still catches the light. Even the ruling is right: red ink lines on both sides of the sheet, exactly as a scribe of 1400 would have prepared a page, though the back was left blank. One habit of the artist's own century slipped through. The text ends in three trailing dots.
The eight lines under the picture are the Gradual for the Mass of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, the feast of Mary's grief at the cross. The feast began at Cologne in 1423 and was extended to the whole Latin Church by Benedict XIII in 1727. The text describes the scene above it. In translation: "Thou art sorrowful and worthy of tears, O Virgin Mary, standing near the cross of the Lord Jesus, thy Son, our Redeemer. O Virgin Mother of God, he whom the whole world doth not contain, the author of life, made man, beareth this punishment of the cross."
Pages like this one came out of the nineteenth-century revival of illumination. France had spent the middle of the century rediscovering its manuscripts. The Comte de Bastard d'Estang's "Peintures et ornements des manuscrits," issued from 1835 to 1869 with a million francs of public money, put 220 hand-painted plates of medieval pages before artists who would never handle a manuscript themselves. By the 1880s ateliers in France and Belgium were producing devotional leaves and whole prayer books in the medieval manner.
The occult revival grew up in the same decades. Eliphas Lévi, the Paris magician whose books started the modern revival of magic, wrote them in the language of the Catholic liturgy. The novelist Joséphin Péladan opened his Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris in 1892 to religion, legend, myth, dream and allegory, and banned modern life from it outright. We would argue that a page like this belongs in an occult bookshop: the magicians and the illuminators were reaching back to the same Middle Ages.
It is a big, handsome leaf, roughly 32 by 23 cm, painted on one side only, and the colors are as fresh as the gold. Details of the leaf and its condition are below.
CRUCIFIXION, WITH THE GRADUAL "DOLOROSA ET LACRIMABILIS ES." Illuminated leaf on vellum, painted in the manner of a fifteenth-century French Book of Hours. France, late nineteenth century.
Physical Description: A single leaf of vellum, approximately 32 x 23 cm, painted on the recto only. Miniature of the Crucifixion in colors and gold, approximately 16.5 x 12 cm, with a round-arched top. Below it a four-line initial D in blue and pink on burnished gold, joined to a bar border of pink and blue acanthus on gold running down both sides and along the foot, and eight lines of Latin in a Gothic hand in black ink, with nine small initials in blue and red and one line-filler in pink, blue, white and gold. The whole surrounded on all four sides by a border of gold ivy leaves, pen tendrils and small flowers in blue, pink and green. Verso blank, ruled in red ink, with a circled pencil number "834" at the foot.
Binding: Unbound leaf, unframed.
Condition: The vellum is cockled and a little wavy across the whole sheet. The outer edge is slightly irregular with one small nick. Light soiling and some faint staining to the verso. The gold on the initial shows minor rubbing. The colors are fresh and the miniature is undamaged.
Somebody spent a very long time on this page. The border alone holds hundreds of gold ivy leaves, each laid on separately and finished with a pen-drawn stem, and inside the border sits a Crucifixion painted in the manner of a Paris Book of Hours of about 1400. The Virgin swoons and John holds her up. The Magdalene kneels at the foot of the cross with her hair down and a handkerchief to her face. A knight on a white horse looks up at Christ, and behind them all a landscape of green hills runs off to a walled town. The page was painted in France late in the nineteenth century, on vellum and with real gold. It is a nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval devotional page.
A Book of Hours was a private prayer book, made to order, and around 1400 the Paris workshops that produced them were doing some of the best painting in Europe. The style is easy to recognize once you have seen it: sprays of gold ivy on hairline tendrils, bars of pink and blue acanthus on burnished gold, a miniature under a round arch, a large initial in blue and gold to open the text. Our artist reproduced all of it. The gold on the initial and the bars is leaf, laid down and burnished, and it still catches the light. Even the ruling is right: red ink lines on both sides of the sheet, exactly as a scribe of 1400 would have prepared a page, though the back was left blank. One habit of the artist's own century slipped through. The text ends in three trailing dots.
The eight lines under the picture are the Gradual for the Mass of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, the feast of Mary's grief at the cross. The feast began at Cologne in 1423 and was extended to the whole Latin Church by Benedict XIII in 1727. The text describes the scene above it. In translation: "Thou art sorrowful and worthy of tears, O Virgin Mary, standing near the cross of the Lord Jesus, thy Son, our Redeemer. O Virgin Mother of God, he whom the whole world doth not contain, the author of life, made man, beareth this punishment of the cross."
Pages like this one came out of the nineteenth-century revival of illumination. France had spent the middle of the century rediscovering its manuscripts. The Comte de Bastard d'Estang's "Peintures et ornements des manuscrits," issued from 1835 to 1869 with a million francs of public money, put 220 hand-painted plates of medieval pages before artists who would never handle a manuscript themselves. By the 1880s ateliers in France and Belgium were producing devotional leaves and whole prayer books in the medieval manner.
The occult revival grew up in the same decades. Eliphas Lévi, the Paris magician whose books started the modern revival of magic, wrote them in the language of the Catholic liturgy. The novelist Joséphin Péladan opened his Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris in 1892 to religion, legend, myth, dream and allegory, and banned modern life from it outright. We would argue that a page like this belongs in an occult bookshop: the magicians and the illuminators were reaching back to the same Middle Ages.
It is a big, handsome leaf, roughly 32 by 23 cm, painted on one side only, and the colors are as fresh as the gold. Details of the leaf and its condition are below.
CRUCIFIXION, WITH THE GRADUAL "DOLOROSA ET LACRIMABILIS ES." Illuminated leaf on vellum, painted in the manner of a fifteenth-century French Book of Hours. France, late nineteenth century.
Physical Description: A single leaf of vellum, approximately 32 x 23 cm, painted on the recto only. Miniature of the Crucifixion in colors and gold, approximately 16.5 x 12 cm, with a round-arched top. Below it a four-line initial D in blue and pink on burnished gold, joined to a bar border of pink and blue acanthus on gold running down both sides and along the foot, and eight lines of Latin in a Gothic hand in black ink, with nine small initials in blue and red and one line-filler in pink, blue, white and gold. The whole surrounded on all four sides by a border of gold ivy leaves, pen tendrils and small flowers in blue, pink and green. Verso blank, ruled in red ink, with a circled pencil number "834" at the foot.
Binding: Unbound leaf, unframed.
Condition: The vellum is cockled and a little wavy across the whole sheet. The outer edge is slightly irregular with one small nick. Light soiling and some faint staining to the verso. The gold on the initial shows minor rubbing. The colors are fresh and the miniature is undamaged.
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