Leaf from a Book of Hours: Text with Illustrated Border (verso) (c. 1510): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: Text with Illustrated Border (verso) (c. 1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This leaf came from a highly customized and lavish book of hours made in Rouen, a major center for book production. Intended for a female patron, the original book, to which the museum owns three leaves, contained numerous illuminations and marginalia. The book was whole until the 1980s, when it was dismembered and the leaves sold separately. Other leaves from the same book are now in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. This leaf precedes the opening of the Hours of the Virgin and the traditional first scene of the Annunciation.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: Text with Illustrated Border (verso)
• Date: c. 1510
• Culture: France, Rouen
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and liquid gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Each leaf: 17.9 x 12.8 cm (7 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2001.79.b

A detail from the museum

The heart of every book of hours is the Hours of the Virgin, a set of prayers in which the reader asked the Virgin Mary to intercede on their behalf.

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.