3-044-241 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Book of Hours, about 1415-1420. Additional Info: Three anonymous artists illuminated this book of hours for a wealthy bourgeois woman, about whom scholars know little besides that she was probably named Margaret. The book typifies those coveted by middle-class women in Europe in the early 1400s. A book of hours contains prayers designed for laypeople and organized for private recitation at the eight canonical hours of the Church day. This luxuriously designed book contains seventeen three-quarter-page miniatures and twelve quarter-page miniatures, all on pages with delicate, leafy borders. The artists used expensive pigments and achieved an extremely high level of artistic refinement that undoubtedly dazzled the client.