Colour as Luxury
A.2.11: Book of Hours (Use of Salisbury), 1530
By the time that this book was produced, printing was well established in Europe and used quite universally for the production of books. However, there were a number of texts, especially Books of Hours such as this, that were luxury items created to mimic medieval manuscripts. A Book of Hour is a personal devotional book usually comprising of a calendar, passages from the four Gospels, the Hours of the Virgin, and psalms, the litany of saints and the office of the dead. The exact texts included could be chosen by the patron, and the calendar often included significant dates in their life (Erler, 1999).
As richly illuminated, personal texts, Books of Hours remained incredibly popular throughout the medieval and early Renaissance periods (Erler, 1999). They spanned religion, gender and class through their focus on imagery and tradition: ‘The needs of less wealthy customers were increasingly fulfilled by printed books, the books of hours being now increasingly illustrated with lavish woodcuts, which could on occasion be hand-coloured to simulate illumination’ (Alexander, 1999, p.60).
This copy was printed in Paris by the Hardouyn brothers, Gillet and Germain, at a time when Paris was a centre of luxury printing (Hofmann, 2023). The text has been printed onto parchment, followed by the illustrations, which were printed by metalcut. From there, the buyer could have the text finished however they pleased. In this case, architectural borders have been added around the illustrations (Hofmann, 2023), which are hand-painted with egg tempera, a typically medieval medium.
The borders, as in this Annunciation scene, are instead painted with a gold paint, likely a mixture
of powdered gold and gum Arabic (Morgan, 2008). A more faithful medieval reproduction would have used gilding, where opaque gold leaf was applied over red bole (a sticky, glue-like substance) and then burnished. Examples of medieval gilding can be seen in the bestiary and astronomical tracts earlier in the exhibition. The gold paint used here may have been a cheaper alternative, but its translucency allows us to see the metalcut beneath, as well as the brushstrokes of the artist as they filled in the border. Details such as this show us how personal Books of Hours were in the early modern era.
References:
Hofmann, P. (2023) ‘St John’s Printed Manuscript’, St John’s College Library, Oxford website; Morgan, N. (2008) ‘Illumination Pigments, drawing, gilding’, Cambridge History of the Book Volume 2: 1100-1400; Erler, M. C. (1999) ‘Devotional literature’, Cambridge History of the Book Volume 3: 1400-1557; from the same volume Meale, C. M. and Boffey, J. (1999) ‘Gentlewomen’s reading’; from the same volume Alexander, J.J.G. (1999) ‘Foreign illuminators and illuminated manuscripts’.