Leaf Excised from a Book of Hours: The Nativity (c. 1480): Art, History and Details

Leaf Excised from a Book of Hours: The Nativity (c. 1480) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of the First Prayerbook of Maximillian (Flemish, c. 1444–1519).

The work and its context

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

This book, made by an artist of the Ghent-Bruges school of illumination, represents the culmination of Flemish book painting. Its main features were the use of rich colors, decorative and illusionistic effects, a love of landscape, and a strong sense of visual narrative. Its most distinctive innovation was the development of a new style of border decoration featuring realistic motifs which cast shadows onto colored grounds to create an effect of spaciousness. These motifs included a diverse assortment of flowers, butterflies, insects, birds, and sprays of acanthus foliage.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf Excised from a Book of Hours: The Nativity
• Date: c. 1480
• Creator attribution: Master of the First Prayerbook of Maximillian (Flemish, c. 1444–1519)
• Culture: Flanders, Ghent, 15th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and liquid gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 10.8 x 8.2 cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.64

Collection credit

The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fliegel, Stephen N. The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection of Manuscript Illuminations. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999.

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.