Leaf from a Book of Hours: Saint James the Greater (c. 1440–1450): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: Saint James the Greater (c. 1440–1450) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of the Gold Scrolls (Belgian).

The work and its context

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

The illuminator of this leaf is one of a group of painters and workshops collectively known as the "Masters of the Gold Scrolls," named after the gold tendrils that frequently, but not always, occupy the backgrounds of the group’s compositions. The present miniature is by one of the Gold Scrolls’ finest hands. From the 1440s onward, the gold scroll motif begins to disappear in their miniatures and replaced, as here, by landscape. Saint James the Greater is shown as a Christian pilgrim. The miniature would have appeared in the Suffrages of the book of hours.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: Saint James the Greater
• Date: c. 1440–1450
• Creator attribution: Master of the Gold Scrolls (Belgian)
• Culture: Flanders, Bruges
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 14.9 x 11.2 cm (5 7/8 x 4 7/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.59

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.