Bought from C.E. Puckett, www.cepuckett.com. Price $250 US. Current owner: Christine Robertson, of Golden Gryphon Productions, 34 Shortland St Wentworth Falls NSW 2782 Australia. This dealer was very easy to deal with; no problems, bought over the Internet, leaf shipped immediately. One thing anyone in Australia should be aware of -- make sure things are not sent by Federal Express, but by regular mail, or you will be stuck with both GST and import duty, which added nearly $100 AUS to the cost of this leaf :-(

recto, 152Kb
recto 461Kb
verso, 172Kb
verso, 515Kb

Permission is explicitly given to download copies of the images referenced directly from this page for the purpose of private study or teaching, or to reference them from another web page or include them on a CD or in a printed publication such as a newsletter or for educational use. All other uses require my written permission.

The notes which accompanied the leaf are as follows:

168 x l08mm. Original leaf from a printed & hand-illuminated Renaissance Book of Hours. Printed by Gilles Hardouyn; illuminated by hand in gold & colors by his brother, Germain Hardouyn. 33 lines per page, ruled in red. Two two-line & twenty-seven one-line initials illuminated in gold on blue/red ground with gold tracery; panel borders illuminated in a floral & scroll pattern. In purpose & format, printed Books of Hours followed the older manuscript examples. The more luxurious were printed on vellum, as is this specimen. Produced at the Hardouyn workshop in Paris, 1509 (use of Rome).

The two-line "Q" begins Lesson VI: Job 14:13-16: "Quis michi..." (Who will grant me this, that thou mayst protect me...). The two-line "E" begins Psalm 39 (complete): "Expectans. . ." (With expectation I have waited for the Lord, and he was attentive to me...Thou art my helper and my protector: O my God, be not slack).

Books of Hours are personal prayer books of a devout and status-conscious society and are not only works of art, but cultural documents of their time. They reveal a unique combination of sacred and secular imagery - made of the finest materials, by the best craftsmen, for a small audience, which could both appreciate and afford them.

Commentary by Owner

will be added as I have time to do so. There are several things noticeable when viewing the actual leaf which are not obvious from the scans, or at least quite hard to see. This leaf is not from a high-quality Book of Hours; the shell gold is very thin in most areas, and the paintwork is very formula and quite hurried. For example, on the recto side you can see quite clearly where the illuminator has grossly mis-ruled the inner border and not even attempted to correct it.

I hope this web page is useful to students of medieval illumination. I have tried to make it so by providing quite high-resolution scans and giving explicit permission to download to images. These scans were run at 300dpi, and are JPEGs with 25% compression. If anyone would like something better, my scanner does up to 1200dpi optical resolution, and I am willing to put such scans as bitmaps (about 50Mb per side) on a CD. Please contact me with any feedback or requests.