Leaf from a Book of Hours: St. Barbara (2 of 2 Excised Leaves) (c. 1465): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: St. Barbara (2 of 2 Excised Leaves) (c. 1465) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of Jacques de Luxembourg (French).

The work and its context

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

Saint Barbara was popular in France, known for being imprisoned in a tower by her father and living as a hermit. In piety, she asked builders to construct her three windows to symbolize the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Her father, enraged by her conversion to Christianity, killed her, after which he was struck by lightning from heaven. She was seen as a protector from sudden death, a common medieval concern, and the patron saint of architects and builders. The text on this leaf is in French, as opposed to Latin.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: St. Barbara (2 of 2 Excised Leaves)
• Date: c. 1465
• Creator attribution: Master of Jacques de Luxembourg (French)
• Culture: France, Eastern France or Paris (?), 15th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 23.7 x 18.6 cm (9 5/16 x 7 5/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.63

A detail from the museum

The owner of a book of hours was intended to stop eight times a day and read the appropriate devotional text.

Collection credit

The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Thompson, Henry Yates, and M. R. James. A Descriptive Catalogue of Fifty Manuscripts from the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson. Cambridge [England]: University Press, 1898.
• Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge. Catalogue of Valuable Books and Illuminated and Other Manuscripts: Which Will Be Sold by Auction ... on Tuesday, the 3rd Day of May, 1904. London: Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, 1904.
• 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.