Hours of the Cross, illuminated manuscript on vellum. Paris, 1425-1435

provenance
(1) Illuminated in Paris by an artist employed at this date principally if not exclusively for the royal family (see below).  Prayers are for male use.  The number ‘1398’ on the spine may be the binder’s attempt to guess at the book’s date, or it might echo lost notes or a tradition of the manuscript’s patron, conceivably Jean de France, who was born in April 1398 the fourth son of Charles VI, and was poisoned in Compiègne in 1416 (his widow later married Humfrey, duke of Gloucester).  Despite the brevity of the text, the manuscript seems to have been executed as a separate book, with original flyleaves at each end, and it may have been a supplement to a Book of Hours already made with the more usual short office of the Cross.

(2) Eighteenth-century armorial bookplate “Ex Libris de Courgy” at each end.  The same bookplate occurs in Fitzwilliam Museum MS 123 (James, Catalogue of Manuscripts, 1895, pp.287–92), a Book of Hours apparently once owned by the duchess of Savoy, Beatrice of Portugal (1504-1538), daughter of King Emmanuel.  That book was acquired by Lord Fitzwilliam in 1808.  Dr Stella Panayotova suggests that the owners were the Parisian bourgeois family of de Courgy, contrôleurs généraux des maisons du roi et de la reine and royal courtiers, guillotined at the Revolution, and that the manuscripts perhaps descended through Baron Antoine-Marie Héron de Villefosse (1774–1852), son of Françoise-Charlotte Héron de Courgy.

(3) Henry Pomeroy, second Viscount Harberton (1749–1829), and by descent through the Paravicini family to their sale, ‘The Property of a Lady’, Christie’s, 24 March 1953, lot 524, £2400 to Bernard Quaritch, London, underbid by Eisemann.

(4) Dudley M. Colman (d.1958), of Hove, bought from Quaritch, cat.716 (1954), no.313, at £3500; his sale in these rooms, 19 May 1958, lot 102, to Marlborough Rare Books, London, for Lord Wardington.

(5) Gilt booklabel of Lord Wardington (1924–2005), and bookplate of his daughter Lucy Anne Pease; exhibited, Association internationale de bibliophilie, Twenty-Third Congress, Stationers’ Hall, London, 24 September 2003, no.11.

text
The Hours of the Passion, in full, in Latin, with a few rubrics in French (“En lieu de te deum”, fol.6v, “A tierce”, fol.18r, etc.), and prayers for use by a man (e.g., “pro me peccatore N. queso”, fol.21v), with Matins (fol.1r), Lauds (fol.9v), Prime (fol.15r), Terce (fol.18v), Sext (fol.22v), None (fol.26v), Vespers (fol.30r) and Compline (fol.38r).  The text was traditionally recited on Fridays, and it shares its iconography (but not its text) with the much shorter Hours of the Cross found in most Books of Hours.

illumination
This is a Book of Hours of the highest quality, from the greatest period of Parisian book production.  The eight large miniatures are by the Bedford Master, the finest and most important illuminator in Paris around 1415–25, and they represent the Master’s own hand at the first pinnacle of his career. The artist’s sobriquet is taken from the famous royal Book of Hours with the arms and portrait of John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford (1389–1435), brother of Henry V and regent of France, now British Library Add. MS. 18850, usually dated to the early to mid-1420s, after the duke’s marriage in Troyes to Anne of Burgundy.  However, recent research on the Bedford Hours by Catherine Reynolds and others has led to the quite unexpected realisation that it must in fact have been begun around 1414–15, long before Bedford himself came to France, and that it was perhaps originally commissioned by Charles VI, for its iconography and style evolved in parallel with the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, on which the Bedford Master was evidently working in the middle of the second decade of the fifteenth century (cf. P. Stirnemann and C. Rabel, ‘The Très Riches Heures and Two Artists associated with the Bedford Workshop’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVII, 2005, pp.534-38; C. Reynolds, ‘The Workshop of the Master of the Duke of Bedford: Definitions and Identities’, G. Croenen, ed., Manuscript Production in Paris c.1400, forthcoming; and the imminent commentary volume by E. König to Das Bedford-Stundenbuch, facsimile, Luzern, 2007).  This new dating of the principal manuscript of the Master’s oeuvre allows us to regroup his work into two quite distinct periods.  The Master may originally have been of Netherlandish origin but his style was certainly formed in Paris in the first decade of the fifteenth century.  By around 1409 he was probably employed on the Grandes Heures of the Duc de Berry (Paris, BnF. ms.lat. 919) and he was working for the dauphin, probably Louis of Guyenne, by about 1413 (cf. I. Villela-Petit, Le bréviaire de Châteauroux, 2003).  The first high period of the Bedford Master’s career, then, was between about 1415 and 1420.  Apart the Bedford Hours itself and his contribution to the Très Riches Heures, his other principal Books of Hours of this time are (1) Vienna ÖNB. cod. 1855, perhaps c.1415 (cf. E. Trenkler, Livre d’heures Handschrift 1855 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 1948); (2) the De Lévis Hours, Yale University, Beinecke MS. 400, c.1417 (Chester Beatty sale in these rooms, 9 May 1933, lot 53; M. Meiss, The De Lévis Hours and the Bedford Workshop, 1972); (3) the Lamoignon Hours, c.1419, Lisbon, Gulbenkian Foundation (Duke of Newcastle sale in these rooms, 21 June 1937, lot 1; catalogue forthcoming, 2007); and (4) the Sobieski Hours, collection of H.M. The Queen, Windsor Castle, probably c.1420 (cf. E.P. Spencer, The Sobieski Hours, 1977).  All are manuscripts of relatively large format, lavishly illuminated throughout without regard to expense.  The Wardington Hours belongs stylistically shortly after the Bedford Hours and was probably executed around the same time as the De Lévis Hours, as noted in B.A. Shailor, Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University, II, MSS. 251-500, 1987, citing the present manuscript on pp.278–79.  The likelihood, suggested by Stirnemann and Rabel, p.538, is that most or all of the Bedford Master’s manuscripts from this date were made for the French royal family.  If the present volume was made for Jean de France, as tentatively suggested above, it was painted by 1416, which in turn might edge the dating of the De Lévis Hours forward by a year or so.

In 1420 the English occupied Paris and the book trade was scattered. The Bedford Master was one of the few major illuminators to remain in the capital, probably directing a workshop which made smaller manuscripts for a commercial market, such as the Hours of Anne de Neufville, c.1420–30, lot 74 in the sale in these rooms, 13 July 1977 (Plummer, The Last Flowering, 1982, no.3).  He must also have returned to work on the still-unfinished Bedford Hours for its new patron, the English regent in Paris. The high quality Books of Hours, however, trickle away to what are clearly shop products by the mid to late 1420s. Around, 1440, however, the Bedford Master seems to re-emerge in Paris with a further series of opulent Books of Hours such as Keble College MS 39; J. Paul Getty Museum, MS. Ludwig IX.6; and the rich but tiny Hours of Jean Dunois, British Library Yates Thompson MS. 3. These mark a second flourishing of the Bedford Master’s style and patterns. This accords with the often-suggested but never proven identification of the Bedford Master with the illuminator Haincelin de Hagenau, documented as “peintre demourant à Paris” in the service of Queen Isabeau in 1403, later in the service of Philippe le Hardi (1404), the dauphin Louis of Guyenne (1409–15), Charles d’Orléans (1409), etc., to 1424, when his name disappears, to reappear as Jean Haincelin from 1438 to 1448-9, who is either the same man or perhaps a son of the same name (cf. R. Rouse and M. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, II, 2000, pp.73–4, and I. Villela-Petit in Paris, 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI, 2004, p.144).  For the Bedford Master in general, in addition to the texts already cited, cf. E.P. Spencer, ‘The Master of the Duke of Bedford: The Bedford Hours’, The Burlington Magazine, CVII, 1965, pp.495–502; M. Meiss, The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries, 1974, pp.363–68; J. Backhouse, ‘A Reappraisal of the Bedford Hours’, British Library Journal, VII, 1981, pp.47–69; C. Reynolds, ‘The Salisbury Breviary, BN. ms.lat. 17294 and Some Related Manuscripts’, PhD dissertation, London University, 1986; C. Sterling, La peinture médiévale à Paris, 1300-1500, I, 1987, pp.419–49; and J. Backhouse, The Bedford Hours, 1990.

The present manuscript is of quite extraordinary delicacy and refinement, from the Master’s early period soon after his exhilarating work on the Très Riches Heures, showing an attention to detail and a brilliance of colour that is altogether breathtaking.  Many of its miniatures have almost parallels in the Bedford Hours itself and in the De Lévis Hours, such as the arrest of Christ (cf. Backhouse, 1990, pl.36, where Christ looks to the left, but to the right, as here, in De Lévis), the Scourging (Backhouse, pl.38, the pillar in the Wardington manuscript having now become part of the structure of the room), the Carrying of the Cross (Backhouse, pl.39), and so on. A distinctive feature of iconography which it shares with the Bedford Hours is the remarkable ring of radiating scrolls around the Crucifixion, as in Backhouse pl.40, with the Christ’s Seven Words on the Cross, perhaps reflecting the current interest in those texts from the Revelations of Saint Bridget.

The subjects of the miniatures are:

1. Folio 1r, The Betrayal of Christ, 110mm. by 66mm., Christ being embraced by Judas from the left as the captain of the soldiers seizes him from the right, Malchus falling to the ground with a lantern as Christ blesses him to cure his severed ear, Saint Peter returning his sword to its scabbard, other soldiers and oriental figures crowding round waving lances, scimitars and lanterns, all set in a landscape with trees on hills below a starry sky.

2. Folio 9v, Christ before Pilate, 108mm. by 65mm., soldiers and oriental figures leading Christ before the throne of Pilate, who turns his body to wash his hands in a gold dish held for him by his treasurer, set below an elaborate textile canopy in a tiled and vaulted gothic room with a stone gateway and a window with its shutters open onto a blue sky.

3. Folio 15r, The Scourging of Christ, 107mm. by 65mm., Christ emaciated and spotted with blood tied to a central stone pillar as three ruffians lash him with bunches of birches, set in a tiled and vaulted room screened off with a dark red tapestry before gothic lattice windows.

4. Folio 18v, The Way to the Cross, 107mm. by 67mm., Christ robed in purple and wearing the Crown of Thorns carrying the Cross helped by Simon of Cyrene, led by soldiers and urged on from behind by the centurion with a pikestaff, the sorrowing Virgin with Saints Mary Magdalene and John following, set in a landscape outside a great gothic gate in the walls of Jerusalem, with trees on hills and a starry sky.

5. Folio 22r, The Nailing to the Cross, 108mm. by 69mm., Christ lying tied to the Cross on the ground as oriental figures hammer in the nails and dig a hole in the ground for raising the Cross, the Virgin kneeling to pull the loin cloth over her son, Saints John and Mary Magdalene in prayer, set in a flowery meadow in a landscape with clumps of trees and Jerusalem in the distance with Pilate and Caiaphas peering over a hill.

6. Folio 26v, The Crucifixion, 110mm. by 67mm., Christ on the Cross with seven banderoles pointing towards his mouth, “pater ignosce eis quia nesciunt [quid faciunt]”, “hodie mecum in paradiso”, “mulier ecce filius tuus”, “hely hely lamazabat[hani]”, “Scitio”, “consummatum est” and “In manus tuas commendo [spiritum meum]”, the centurion standing pointing upwards and holding a banderole, “Vere filius dei erat iste”, two soldiers on the right, the Virgin and three saints on the left, a skull in the foreground, set on a bare hillside with the sun, moon and stars in a swirl of light and darkness around Christ’s head.

7. Folio 30r, The Descent from the Cross, 108mm. by 68mm., Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and two assistants removing the nails and lowering the Body from the Cross, the three Maries on the left, Saint John weeping on the right, set in a meadow in a landscape with trees on hillsides, below a starry sky.

8. Folio 35r, The Entombment, 107mm. by 66mm., Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus placing the Body in a mottled marble sarcophagus, wrapped in cloth, attended by Saint John and the three Maries, set (unusually) in a gothic interior with tiled floor and red tapestry screen, hanging lamps above – as in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – and a view of a city through an arcade behind.