Leaf from a Psalter with Historiated Initial (B): King David (c. 1450): Art, History and Details

Leaf from a Psalter with Historiated Initial (B): King David (c. 1450) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Books of hours evolved from psalters, books that contained the Old Testament book of Psalms (sacred songs) for use in churches. Psalters also included calendars, prayers for the dead, and a specific group of prayers known as the Hours of the Virgin. By the 1200s, laypeople were requesting psalters without the cumbersome psalms, and thus the book of hours was born. This leaf contains Psalm 1, which begins with a large, decorated B containing an image of King David kneeling with a plucking instrument on the ground. The text says beatus vir qui non abit, or “blessed is the man.”

Object facts

• Title: Leaf from a Psalter with Historiated Initial (B): King David
• Date: c. 1450
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and gold on parchment
• Dimensions: Sheet: 45.7 x 34.3 cm (18 x 13 1/2 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1964.149

A detail from the museum

The larger size of this leaf indicates it could be used by a group of readers.

Collection credit

Gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Rodolphe Kann Collection: Pictures. Paris: C. Sedelmeyer, 1907.
• Milliken, William Mathewson. Pages from Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts from the Xth to the Early XVIth Centuries: An Exhibition. Berkeley: University of California, 1963.
• Pillsbury, Edmund P. Florence and the Arts; Five Centuries of Patronage. 1971.

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.