Rothschild Book of Hours
The Rothschild Hours is a derived, handwritten and illustrated with pictures of Flanders Book of Hours , which was illuminated by several late medieval artists in the years 1500 to 1520. It has the format 228 × 160 mm and comprises a total of 254 pages.
history
The Book of Hours was created after 1500, when the majority of such books were already being printed. It is therefore believed that the person who commissioned this book must have been a very wealthy man. At the beginning of the 16th century the manuscript belonged to a branch of the Wittelsbach family and found its way into the library of the Count Palatine in Heidelberg , today's Heidelberg University Library . It was removed from the library there before 1623 and only came into the possession of the Rothschild family in the late 19th century . After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild gave the book of hours as a gift to the National Socialist regime in Germany in exchange for the release of other valuables . Since then it has been kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna as Codex Vindobonensis SN 2844 . It was not until 1999 that the ban on exporting culturally significant works for the book of hours and other parts of the donation was lifted and the bundle was returned to the Rothschild family.
In 2009 the book of hours was auctioned at Christie's in London. In another auction at Christie's in New York City in 2014, the manuscript went to the Australian businessman Kerry Stokes from Perth in Western Australia and can now be seen in the National Library of Australia .
content
There are illuminations on 140 pages of the manuscript, some of which show images of the month in the corresponding months . The text pages of the book of hours are very often decorated with flowers at the edges, there are depictions of bronze figures using the trompe l'oeil technique and the texts are also framed by illusionistic wood imitations.
The artists who contributed to the Rothschild Book of Hours include Gerard Horenbout , Gerard David and Simon Bening .
In 1979 Ernst Trenkler (1902–1982) in Graz published a complete facsimile in the original format in the series of the Austrian National Library Codices Selecti as volume LXVII with the title Rothschild Gebetbuch facsimile and commentarium .
literature
- T. Kren, S. McKendrick (Eds.): Illuminating the Renaissance. The triumph of Flemish manuscript painting in Europe . Getty Museum / Royal Academy of Arts, 2003, ISBN 1-903973-28-7 .
- Ingo F. Walther, Norbert Wolf: Masterpieces of Illumination. (Codices Illustres). Taschen-Verlag, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-8228-4750-X , pp. 350–353.
