Book of hours of Mary of Burgundy
The Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy is a prayer book .
description
- Liturgy of Rome . Flanders , around 1477. 22.5 × 15 cm, 187 ff.
- 24 Calendar - illustrations , 20 full-page miniatures , 32 small miniatures, including figurative initials .
- Austrian National Library , Vienna, Cod. 1857.
Miniature: Mary in the church. Thomas of Canterbury in initial f. 14v – 15: The full-page miniature shows a lady seated at an open window that looks out onto the choir of a Gothic church. She sits in her prayer chair and recites her prayers of the hours, a dog on her lap and next to her on the window ledge a veil, a gold chain with a jeweled pendant, carnations and a vase with irises . Below the vase is a gold embroidered pillow. The lady is believed to be Mary of Burgundy as a young princess shortly after the death of her father, Charles the Bold , in 1477; but she wears no mourning clothes, rather a dress made of golden-brown velvet and a tapered hat with a veil.
She holds her prayer book very carefully, one hand under the green chemisette cover, while one finger of the other carefully points out the page on which the book is open. On the open page the initial "O" can be clearly seen; so it could be that she reads the prayer “Obsecro te” - “I beg you”.
In the church behind is a group that could be used as an illustration of the prayer. In front of an altar with a gold back wall sits the blue-robed Virgin Mary with child . Four angels with candles sit on the corners of the carpet on which the chair is standing. On the left kneeling in front of the Virgin is a lady with three companions. It could also be Mary of Burgundy, only here dressed in gold brocade . On the right, a young man is swinging a censer. This gentleman could be Maria's husband Maximilian of Austria . The fact that his coat of arms and his initials are missing speaks against this. There is no text in the thumbnail.
On the opposite side begins the prayer “The seven joys of Mary”, which St. Attributed to Thomas Becket of Canterbury . It begins with a figurative initial "L" of the rubric , which shows the saint kneeling at a lectern in front of a vision of the Virgin Mary with child. The subject of the initial is therefore the “obsecro te”, as shown in detail in the miniature, except that there is a lady instead of the saint. Contrary to the usual arrangement, the main scene was moved to the background and the viewer's attention was drawn to the woman reading. In this way, two levels are connected: in the foreground the real image of a lady with accessories from a still life , in the background a pious vision on the subject of prayer.
execution
Maria's book of hours is, at least in part, a black prayer book. On the first thirty-four pages the text is written in gold and silver on black fields that are surrounded by colored borders painted on the white background of the parchment . It can be assumed that after her father's death a funeral book was to be created, for which there was a forerunner in the family in the black book of hours of Charles the Bold.
The Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy, however, was not carried on as apparently intended. The imminent approach of her wedding made this seem inappropriate, because a few months later she married the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian of Austria . From sheet 35 on, text and borders appear on a white background.
Illuminator
The prayer book is a major work by the master of Maria von Burgund , who designed this and possibly another book of hours - the “Berlin Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Emperor Maximilians” (manuscript 78 B 12 in the Berlin copper engraving cabinet ). The anonymous artist was identified alternately as Philippe Mazerolles, Alexander Bening , Nicolas van der Goes (brother of the better-known Hugo van der Goes ) and Claes or Nicolas Spierinc, who mainly worked as a scribe. In the facsimile edition of 1969, Antoine van Schryve argued successfully for Nicolas Spierinc , he held two artists responsible for the book of hours of Mary of Burgundy, whom he identified as Claes Spierinc and Liétard van Lathem . Both were highly valued by Charles the Bold, for whom they designed a Petites Heures together .
Whoever painted the reading lady in Maria's book of hours was a perfect master who introduced new ideas to book illumination . He was the inventor of the “view from a window” theme, which added a new sense of space to the unified whole of the miniature. The surface of the parchment becomes a window that looks out onto a panorama in the distance, with the border as a frame. This painterly attempt at optical illusion leads away from the two-dimensional world of Gothic in the direction of a future in which the artists were increasingly concerned with the problems of light, perspective and the optically accurate representation of the object in space.
literature
- The Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy. In: John Harthan: Books of hours and their owners. German translation by Regine Klett. Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) et al. 1977, ISBN 3-451-17907-5 , pp. 110-113.
See also
Web links
- Gallery - The Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy
- General introduction to the Liturgy of the Hours, Laudes
Individual evidence
- ↑ Article on the "Berlin Book of Hours of Mary of Burgundy and Emperor Maximilians". (PDF) In: Journal für Kunstgeschichte 3 , 1999, Issue 4. Ed .: HEIJOURNALS - Heidelberger OJS-Journals , p. 364, accessed on January 23, 2020.