‘ILLUMINATED BOOKS’ IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Centuries ago, a savvy European art collector was less likely to find a piece of artwork hanging on a wall than he was to see one tied to someone’s belt.

Pocket-size personal prayer books, in Medieval times often worn as “girdle books,” were, along with other manuscripts, illustrated with paintings.

“In the Middle Ages, most of the greatest artists painted in books,” said Thom Kren, manuscript curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, “including Jean Fouquet, the finest French artist of the 15th Century.”

Kren has organized an exhibition of devotional illuminated manuscripts, all made for private use, on view at the Getty to Oct. 5. “Illuminated Books of Hours” includes 20 personal prayer books from the 14th to the 16th centuries, their meticulously detailed scenes richly rendered in jewellike reds and blues or gold and other metals by French, Flemish, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and English painters.

“The most exciting thing about the books is that they’ve been closed for hundreds of years,” said Kren, 36, an enthusiast with a doctorate in Dutch painting from Yale. “So invariably the colors are as brilliant as they were when first painted.”

Illuminated manuscripts were first produced in the 8th and 9th centuries in European monasteries for communal liturgical use, their paintings meant to illustrate a written text. The books of hours from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance were the first volumes made for private worship. They were named for the Hours of the Virgin, a cycle of prayers to be read at home at eight set points of the day in veneration of the Virgin Mary.

“The books became enormously popular around the late 14th to 15th centuries,” said Kren. “They were the best sellers of the Middle Ages.

“It was basically a bourgeois phenomenon. The rise of the middle class meant a tremendous increase in wealth and the books became status symbols. There was a cultural competitiveness as to who had the prettiest book of hours in Bruges perhaps, or Paris.”

Each book of hours follows a prescribed “program” or method of decoration, said Kren, a Getty staff member since 1980, and a content structure that begins with a calendar section, includes gospel passages, penitential psalms and ends with prayers for the dead.

“Almost all the imagery is religious in nature, except for the secular calendar section which includes the labors or leisures of each month, for example. You see scenes of peasants in a barnyard sheering sheep in June, or elegantly costumed aristocrats boating in May.”

Strange zoomorphic creatures, sinuous border florals or saints bent in penitence also adorn the books, most bought by the Getty from private collections throughout the world.

However, recently acquired illustrations by Fouquet from the “Book of Hours” of Simon de Varie (1455) take center stage in the exhibit. They are the first illuminated manuscripts by the artist discovered in 80 years.

“Fouquet worked for King Charles VIII,” Kren said, “and De Varie was a member of the French court who commissioned the typically personalized book in whose frontispiece he appears.

“Fouquet was one of the first French artists to go to Italy and bring the influence of European Renaissance art back to the north,” Kren said. His realistic diptych of De Varie knelt in prayer shows “a more convincing sense of one-point perspective and a new sense of volume, or 3-D, if you like.

“So these illuminations show us a lot about the development of art. But they also tell us about European costume, architecture and taste for decorative objects and furniture of the time,” he said, citing an illustration by Flemish artist Llangattock. The work depicts a detailed Flemish dwelling complete with a paneled ceiling.

“But the rise of the printing press during the Renaissance spelled the eventual end of all illuminated manuscripts,” Kren said. “In the space of time it took to make one book by hand, the machines could produce several hundred or thousand. The books were then illustrated with woodcuts or metal engravings, and by 1550 there was only one great Flemish illustrator still active. The art form was no longer attracting the great artists.”