Description
The book is very small: the size of each vellum folio or page is 3 5/8 x 2 7/16 in. (9.2 x 6.2 cm), and the overall size including the current replacement binding is 3 7/8 x 2 13/16 x 1 1/2 in. (9.9 x 7.2 x 3.8 cm). There are 209 folios, with 25 full page miniatures, but many other historiated initials and images in the borders of most pages, so that over 700 illustrations have been counted. Only ten folios have no decoration, just plain text, suggesting that the book was never entirely finished. The vellum is extremely thin, almost transparent, and the text by an unknown scribe is very finely written.
The miniatures use a variety of grisaille drawing in pen known as "de blanc et noir" and tempera for the other colours. Using both grisaille and colour together is a technique known as “camaiue-gris”. The full-page paintings include cycles of what are always the most commonly found phases of the Life of Christ, the Passion and Infancy. These illustrate the Hours of the Virgin, which is found in some other books of hours, but most unusually they are arranged on facing pages showing a scene from the Passion on the left and from the Infancy on the right, with eight pairs of scenes. However such an arrangement is often found in the ivory diptychs that were being produced in great numbers in Paris at this period. Another cycle shows nine scenes from the life of the Saint-King Louis IX of France decorating the office dedicated to him. Saint Louis was the great-grandfather of both Queen Jeanne and her husband Charles IV, who were first cousins.
The text is unusual in that the saints' days noted in the calendar, and those mentioned in the litany, are clearly those of Paris, featuring all the otherwise obscure local saints one would expect, such as Saint Cloud and Saint Germain. However the rest of the text follows forms typical of hours written for members of the Dominican order. It is possible that two different models were accidentally used by the scribes, though this seems somewhat careless in a major royal commission. But Queen Jeanne was especially close to the Dominicans, so the mixture of texts may be deliberate. Various mistakes in other parts of the book are corrected, which for appearance's sake they often are not in luxury books, but the calendar has no corrections, despite misspelling over 30 saints' names, and giving 15 the wrong feast days.
Read more about this topic: Hours Of Jeanne D'Evreux
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