Turin-Milan Hours - The Artists

The Artists

The French art historian Paul Durrieu fortunately published his monograph, with photographs, on the Turin Hours in 1902, two years before it was burnt. He was the first to recognise that the Turin and Milan Hours were from the same volume, and to connect them with the van Eyck brothers. Georges Hulin de Loo, in his work on the Milan portion published in 1911 (by which time the Turin portion was already lost), made a division of the artists into "Hands" A–K in what he thought was their chronological sequence. This has been broadly accepted – as regards the lost Turin portion few have been in a position to dispute it – but the identification of them has been the subject of great debate, and Hand J in particular is now sub-divided by many. Hands A–E are French, from before the division of the work, Hands G–K are Netherlandish from after it, and Hand F has been attributed to both groups.

Hand G is universally agreed to be the most innovative; Hulin de Loos described his miniatures as "the most marvelous that had ever decorated a book, and, for their time the most stupefying known to the history of art. For the first time we see realized, in all of its consequences, the modern conception of painting... For the first time since antiquity, painting recovers the mastery of space and light" Hulin de Loos thought these the work of Hubert van Eyck, who, like most art historians of the time, he also thought the main artist of the Ghent Altarpiece. He thought the less exciting, but similar, Hand H might be Jan van Eyck. Since then art historical opinion has shifted to see both Hand G and most of the Ghent Altarpiece as the work of Jan; Max J. Friedländer, Anne van Buren and Albert Châtelet were among the proponents of this view. More recently, some art historians see Hand G as a different but related artist, in some ways even more innovative than the famous brothers. The dating of the Hand G miniatures has been placed at various points between 1417 and the late 1430s.

The pages attributed to Hand H include the Agony in the Garden, Way to Calvary and Crucifixion. They are usually dated after 1416-17, typically 1422-24, based on their style and on possible identifications of the donors. Hulin de Loo considered them van Eyck's "juvenilia", while Friedländer and Panofsky associated them with the workshop of van Eyck; although the leafs are not as refined and do not evince the same technical ability as those of Hand G, they contain very realistic and unflinching depictions of human distress as well as a number of iconographic and stylistic innovations that suggest they may have been copies of prototypes by Jan. Charles Sterling notes similarities between Hand H and passages in the New York Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych miniature, a work for which completion dates as wide as 1420-1438 have been suggested, and which is known to have been finished by members of Jan's workshop. He notes the influence on van Eyck's successor in Bruges, Petrus Christus, who is known to have served as a journeyman in Jan's studio from the early 1430s. He suggests that the "Agony in the Garden" in particular was influential on painters in the 1430s, especially on southern German painters such as Hans Multscher and Lodewijck Allynckbrood who produced a number of works clearly indebted to Hand H.

Hands I–K are all working in a similar Eyckian style, perhaps following underdrawing or sketches by Hand G, and are usually seen as members of Jan's workshop, although many now think work continued after Jan's death, which was by 1441 (Hubert had died in 1426). Many iconographical, as well as stylistic correspondences have been noted with other manuscripts and painting produced in Bruges from the 1430s on, and it seems clear that the manuscript was located there at this time. Numerous suggestions have been made as to their identities, mostly as anonymous illuminators named after a particular work. Hand K is the latest and generally the weakest of the later group, working up to about 1450, and "probably painting outside the workshop environment"; he is often identified as, or linked with, the Master of the Llangattock Hours.

Often the bas-de-page and main miniature are by different artists, as in the Getty's leaf, and also the borders and historiated initials.