Leaf from a Book of Hours: The Last Judgment (1430s): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Book of Hours: The Last Judgment (1430s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of Guillebert de Mets (Flemish); Workshop.

The work and its context

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

The Master of Guillebert de Mets is named after the scribe who records his name in an illuminated copy of the Decameron, made for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, and for which he contributed many of its miniatures. He was active from about 1410 to 1445. So far there is no proof that allows us to follow his career or to know precisely where he worked. Calendars in other manuscripts with which he is associated suggest his shop may have been in Tournai, Liège, Bruges, and more credibly, Ghent. His commissions may have been linked to the itinerant Burgundian court, though no original provenance survives for any of his manuscripts. The Master of Guillebert de Mets painted in an easily recognizable style. His figures have prominent heads with well-delineated eyes and small mouths, slender torsos with thin, spindly legs, and long, finely worked fingers. Many of his miniatures, such as the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment here, show that he often favored mosaic backgrounds of delicately worked checkered patterns.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Book of Hours: The Last Judgment
• Date: 1430s
• Creator attribution: Master of Guillebert de Mets (Flemish); Workshop
• Culture: Flanders, Ghent (?), 15th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Each leaf: 12.6 x 8.5 cm (4 15/16 x 3 3/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1999.130

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.
• Vanwijnsberghe, Dominique, et. al. "A l'Escu de France": Guillebert de Mets et la peinture de livres à Gand à l'époque de Jan van Eyck (1410-1450). Bruxelles : Institut royal du patrimoine artistique, 2017.
• Gertsman, Elina and Barbara H. Rosenwein. The Middle Ages in 50 Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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.