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Details
DIGGING and THRESHING, two full-page miniatures from the Calendar of a Book of Hours, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM
[southern Netherlands, Tournai, c.1490]
104 x 75mm. Each leaf with an arch-topped miniature: a) with a man in the foreground digging in bare soil, behind him in the middle distance a rocky outcrop on the left and an elaborate gothic structure on the right, a windmill beyond that, all set in an extensive landscape and with the sign of the zodiac at the top; b) with two men in a thatched barn threshing grain with a small figure of Virgo seated at the top, each miniature surrounded by a full-page strewn border with robins and flowers on a liquid gold ground, versos blank (smudging of outer border of a).
It is most unusual for there to be full-page miniatures in a Calendar; they provide a rare representation of secular, rustic life in the Middle Ages. Other leaves from the same Book of Hours, with more convential miniatures of religious subjects, have recently been offered on the market, most recently St Francis receiving the stigmata: Maggs Bros Ltd, Illuminated Leaves and Historical Documents, cat.1262, 1998, no 44.
It is possible to localise the manuscript on the basis of an intact Book of Hours illuminated by the same artist (Cambridge, Trinity College, Ms B. 13. 11), which has both textual and iconographic features identifying its production in or around Tournai: A. Arnould & J. M. Massing, Splendours of Flanders, Cambridge 1993, cat. no 24, pp.82-3.
(2)
[southern Netherlands, Tournai, c.1490]
104 x 75mm. Each leaf with an arch-topped miniature: a) with a man in the foreground digging in bare soil, behind him in the middle distance a rocky outcrop on the left and an elaborate gothic structure on the right, a windmill beyond that, all set in an extensive landscape and with the sign of the zodiac at the top; b) with two men in a thatched barn threshing grain with a small figure of Virgo seated at the top, each miniature surrounded by a full-page strewn border with robins and flowers on a liquid gold ground, versos blank (smudging of outer border of a).
It is most unusual for there to be full-page miniatures in a Calendar; they provide a rare representation of secular, rustic life in the Middle Ages. Other leaves from the same Book of Hours, with more convential miniatures of religious subjects, have recently been offered on the market, most recently St Francis receiving the stigmata: Maggs Bros Ltd, Illuminated Leaves and Historical Documents, cat.1262, 1998, no 44.
It is possible to localise the manuscript on the basis of an intact Book of Hours illuminated by the same artist (Cambridge, Trinity College, Ms B. 13. 11), which has both textual and iconographic features identifying its production in or around Tournai: A. Arnould & J. M. Massing, Splendours of Flanders, Cambridge 1993, cat. no 24, pp.82-3.
(2)