Leaf from a Book of Hours: Office of the Dead: Two Devils (verso) (c. 1460): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: Office of the Dead: Two Devils (verso) (c. 1460) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Coëtivy Master (French).

The work and its context

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

As a time-saving device, illuminators in the 1450s and later would often paint identical borders on both sides of a leaf. The motifs would be drawn on one side and then traced on the other by holding the leaf against a window. Both sides of this leaf are therefore mirror images, containing elaborate floral borders, gold-leaf ivy vines, sprays of flowers or fruit, and a grotesque, in this case a bird with the head of a man. Also included is a roundel featuring two devils. This leaf is from a dismantled manuscript that included numerous painted roundels relating to the lives of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and the more obscure Saint Alexis.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: Office of the Dead: Two Devils (verso)
• Date: c. 1460
• Creator attribution: Coëtivy Master (French)
• Culture: France, Paris
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 19.7 x 14.3 cm (7 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2005.206.b

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.