Hours of Jean de Boucicaut

The Book of Hours of Jean de Boucicaut, Marshal of France founded a typical Parisian style, which was picked up, transmitted and processed by book artists of the first half of the 15th century.

Description

Performing artist

The Master of Boucicaut, which for this outstanding soldier, whose name it bears, this illuminated prayer book, was a brilliant landscape painter who achieved so far not reached effects of light and atmospheric perspective in the book illumination. He was identified in 1905 by Paul Durrieu as Jacques Coene, painter from Bruges, who had settled in Paris.

Outstanding examples of his style are the visitation, and the Flight into Egypt in the Lauds and Vespers of Marienoffiziums that complement each other in the design but is generally brightened in different ways. In the Visitation of the light from the image above pours down upon the heads of Mary and Elizabeth. In the Flight into Egypt sends the rising sun, one of three orange rings surrounded golden ball, its rays in the blue sky upward. In both pictures, the sky transmits its luminosity to the earthly landscape.

Around the year 1400 was in Paris, the market for illuminated manuscripts of all kinds so large that the demand outstripped supply. It is strange that there the Master of Boucicaut apparently failed to get a job at court. Meis Lists more than fifty manuscripts, which are brought in connection with this masterpiece.

Marshal Jean de Boucicaut

From his biographer Boucicaut was portrayed as almost superhuman pious. He spent several hours each day in prayer, heard every day twice the mass, fasting on Fridays and wore black. The fact that his prayer book begins with seven large miniatures of saints that are related to his life points to special devotion habits. The first is the hl. Leonhard, the patron saint of prisoners, chained to two kneeling figures (Johann, Count of Nevers and he himself ), remembering Boucicauts successful escape in Nikopol.