FEATURES ARCHIVE

Susannah Morris, Specialist in the London Books & Manuscripts department, contemplates one of the Books of Hours from The Arcana Collection: Exceptional Illuminated Manuscripts, Part III, to be offered at Christie’s King Street on 6 July.

Hitching up her skirts, the Virgin heads to the Temple, looking back with a reassuring glance at her anxious parents -- this touching scene appears in one of the most beautiful Books of Hours from the Arcana Collection. The Book of Hours was the most popular form of prayerbook in the Middle Ages (it is sometimes referred to as ‘the medieval best-seller’), and much of the appeal of these manuscripts derives from the fact that they were made not for priests or monks but for ordinary people to be used in private devotion. Their decorative schemes are as infinitely variable as their owners, for these very personal books were also meant to delight visually – indeed, in some cases they seem to have been made quite as much for display and demonstrations of wealth and discernment as for devotional purposes. At their best, as in the Arcana examples, they display the work of the finest artists of their age with unmatchable freshness, but also with striking individuality, reflecting their original owners’ tastes, interests and lives. While the main illuminations necessarily depict the biblical themes suggested by the text, scenes from everyday life often burst into the borders, which are rich with figures of children spinning tops, peasants dancing in a ring, gentlefolk promenading and huntsmen with their hounds.

The images of the Virgin illustrated here are drawn from an entrancing Book of Hours which was made in Avignon, for a lady, in around 1415. It would be customary for its central text, the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to be illustrated with scenes surrounding the infancy of Christ, but here, most unusually, the Office is illustrated instead with an appealingly human series of scenes from the infancy of the Virgin herself. The miniatures, each surrounded with glittering foliate borders worked in green and gold, show the Virgin from her birth to her marriage; she is shown walking up the steps to the Temple, praying before the Ark of the Covenant, reading whilst being brought food by an angel and here, perhaps the most striking image in the manuscript, she is depicted seated at her loom, weaving the veil of the Temple.