Book of Hours (Use of Rouen) (c. 1470): Art, History and Details

Book of Hours (Use of Rouen) (c. 1470) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of the Geneva Latini (French, active Rouen, 1460–80).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In the late 1400s and early 1500s, Rouen, France, was an established and important center of book production. The city’s cathedral had a wealthy chapter that spent large sums of money to commission books and to maintain its extensive library. The stationers (sellers of writing supplies) and booksellers would have likely been concentrated in or near the cathedral precinct. This artist, named after a manuscript now in Geneva, Switzerland, was Rouen’s principal illuminator during the second half of the 1400s. The structure and artistic design are typical for manuscripts of the time.

Object facts

• Title: Book of Hours (Use of Rouen)
• Date: c. 1470
• Creator attribution: Master of the Geneva Latini (French, active Rouen, 1460–80)
• Culture: France, Rouen
• Type: Bound Volume
• Technique: ink, tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Codex: 19.5 x 13.1 cm (7 11/16 x 5 3/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1952.227

A detail from the museum

Books of hours were often produced as luxury objects in order to reflect the owner’s status, wealth, and taste.

Collection credit

Gift of the Feiss family in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Paul L. Feiss

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ritter, Georges, and Jean Lafond. Manuscrits à peintures de l'école de Rouen: livres d'heures normands. Rouen: A. Lestringant, 1913.
• Leroquais, V. Les bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France. Paris: [Macon, Protat frères, imprimeurs], 1934.
• Ricci, Seymour de, William Jerome Wilson, Anne M. Nill, and W. H. Bond. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. 1935.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.