Leaf from a Psalter and Prayerbook: Calendar Page with Labors (recto) (c. 1524): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Psalter and Prayerbook: Calendar Page with Labors (recto) (c. 1524) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

These three leaves represent the charming, intricate decoration found throughout the parent volume, its leaves now dispersed. Virtually every border, recto and verso, was decorated with liquid gold and highlighted with a variety of flowers, fruits, and vegetables—carnations, thistles, roses, violets, peas, melons—as well as cornucopias, satyrs, masks, insects, birds, etc. The decoration is particularly charming because of the little vignettes within the borders. These motifs depict a girl kneading bread, a cook ladling soup, a goose nibbling grapes off a vine, and a satyr with a horn. Such details would have been a sumptuous delight to the original owner. This was a highly personalized volume, apparently written and illuminated in North Germany. The prominent mention of Saint Godehard (died 1038), Bishop of Hildesheim, in the original manuscript suggests that it was produced in that city.

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Psalter and Prayerbook: Calendar Page with Labors (recto)
• Date: c. 1524
• Culture: Germany, Hildesheim (?), 16th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera and liquid gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Leaf: 16.6 x 13.5 cm (6 9/16 x 5 5/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2011.67.a

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.