Three Dutch brothers named Herman, Paul,and Johan (or Jean) Limbourg turned decorating books into a fine art during the Medieval Period. In the late 1380s, the Limbourg Brothers were born in the Netherlands into an artistic family. Their father was a wood carver and their uncle was anartist who worked for the French queen and the duke of Burgundy. The brothers began painting for the royal family when they were in their teens and were hired by Jean, duc de Berry, the wealthiest art lover in France.
Picture Books
The duke asked the Limbourg Brothers tomake him a Book of Hours, which had prayers for each hour of the day along with a calendar. Most books at that time were religious and were written out entirely by hand by a person called a scribe. The duke wanted the LImbourg Brothers to illuminate his book with paintings in bright colors decorated with gold. Illuminate means “to fill with light”.
The Limbourg Brothers’Book of Hours had the first illustrations with such realistic detail. They were the first to illustrate a scene in the snow, skies with clouds, and smoke rising from a chimney. When the brothers finished, the duke requested another, longer Book of Hours that he named the Tres Riches Heures (Very Rich Hours). This second book is considered an absolute masterpiece of illumination. There are 206 pages of art and decorative text. Before they could finish the book, all three brothers died the same year in the plague. The bubonic plague, also called the BlackDeath, was a deadly disease that killed over one-third of the people in Europein just three years.
Further Reading
1.Book of Hours: The book of hours has its ultimate origin in the Psalter (诗篇), which monks and nuns were required to recite. By the 12th century this had developed into the breviary (每日祈祷书), with weekly cycles of psalms (诗篇) prayers, hymns, antiphons (轮流吟唱的歌), and readings which changed with the liturgical (礼拜仪式的) season. Eventually a selection of texts was produced in much shorter volumes and came to be called a book of hours.
Many books of hours were made for women. There is some evidence that they were sometimes given as a wedding present from a husband to his bride. Frequently they were passed down through the family, as recorded in wills.
The book of hours is a Christian devotional book popular inthe Middle Ages. It is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Like every manuscript, each manuscript book of hours is unique in one way or another, but most contain a similar collection of texts, prayers and psalms, often with appropriate decorations, for Christian devotion. Illumination or decoration is minimal in many examples, often restricted to decorated capital letters at the start of psalms and other prayers, but books made for wealthy patrons may be extremely lavish, with full-page miniatures.
2.The Gutenberg Bible (also knownas the 42-line Bible, the Mazarin Bible or the B42) was the first major book printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe. It marked the startof the "Gutenberg Revolution" and the age of the printed book in the West. Widely praised for its high aesthetic and artistic qualities, the book has an iconic status. Written in Latin, the Catholic Gutenberg Bible is an edition of the Vulgate, printed by Johannes Gutenberg, in Mainz, in present-day Germany, in the 1450s. Since its publication, 49 copies (or substantial portions of copies) have survived, and they are considered to be among the mostvaluable books in the world even though no complete copy has been sold since1978.
References:
1.Heather Alexander, A Child’sIntroduction to Art, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2014.
2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_hours
By Emily
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