Turin-Milan Hours - The Miniatures and Borders

The Miniatures and Borders

The page size is about 284 x 203 mm. Nearly all the pages illustrated with miniatures have the same format, with a main picture above four lines of text and a narrow bas-de-page ("foot of the page") image below. Most miniatures mark the beginning of a section of text, and the initial is a decorated or historiated square. Often the bas de page image shows a scene of contemporary life related in some way to the main devotional image, or an Old Testament subject. The borders, with one exception, all follow the same relatively simple design of stylised foliage, typical of the period when the work was started, and are largely or completely from the first phase of decoration in the 14th century. These would have been done by less senior artists in the workshop, or even sub-contacted out. In the pages completed in the earlier campaigns the borders are further decorated by the miniaturists with small angels, animals (mostly birds), and figures, but the later artists usually did not add these.

The single exception to the style of the borders is a destroyed page, with the main miniature a Virgo inter virgines by Hand H. The border here is in a richer and later 15th century style, from 1430 at the earliest, partly overpainting a normal border, which has also been partly scraped off. This is probably because the original border contained a portrait of a previous owner, of which traces can be seen.

The Paris Très Belles Heures probably originally contained 31 instead of the current 25 illustrated pages, which when added to 40 in the original Turin portion, 28 in the Milan-Turin portion, 5 in the Louvre and 1 in Malibu, gives a total of at least 105 illustrated pages, a very large number, approaching the 131 illustrated pages of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which also took many decades to complete.