Artist's Statement

Rachel Hertzberg

April 28, 2017

Medieval Art and Architecture

Doctor Doyle

 

 

Artist’s Statement for Book of Hours Final Project

 

In the 13^th century, Europe saw a shift from monastic to commercial forms of book production. Individual patrons, usually nobles, could commission prayer books to be used in private, as opposed to these books being produced in monasteries for public liturgical reading.[1] The Book of Hours, as it is known today, was developed in urban centers such as Paris, Ghent, and Bruges, and many were highly individualized, even including depictions of their owners. Others, however, were more mass produced, as workshops “followed templates and standard patterns”[2] to create instantly recognizable iconography. Specific images or biblical stories helped serve as page markers, locating the reader in a specific point in the text.[3] Because these books were meant to be read and re-read over the course of an individual’s lifetime, each image would have had strong connotations with the text with which it was associated.

The core of the Book of Hours was the Hours of the Virgin. Although many books also included other sequences of prayer, such as the Office of the Dead or the Hours of the Cross, the eight canonical hours associated with events of the Virgin Mary’s life remained the “core” [4] of the text. In a typical Book of Hours, originating in late 15^th century France and currently housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hours of the Virgin begins with an illumination of the Annunciation. The Annunciation was paired with the Matins hour, the midnight prayer; as the medieval reader started a new day’s cycle, Mary began her new life as the vessel of God. One can imagine the sense of hope and excitement that this story would bring to the new day.

The Annunciation, like most illuminations, was signaled with instantly recognizable iconography. Mary was universally portrayed wearing blue and crowned with a halo to show her divinity. She typically knelt in prayer, her hands folded piously. The Gospel of Luke does not specify what Mary was doingwhen Gabriel arrived. Prior to the late 14^th century, she was often depicted weaving. In later depictions she was shown in front of a book.[5] To medieval Christians, all books evoked the bible. The codex was a symbol of salvation, and the physical object was inseparable from the message it carried.[6] The reader of a book of hours, therefore, would have known that Mary’s literacy not only signaled education or intelligence, but also devotion to prayer and God. Moreover, Mary is mirroring the reader of the Book of Hours. Her prayer reinforces the reader’s act of prayer. Gabriel, the other figure in the illumination, is clothed in red and has no halo. In some Books of Hours, he does have a halo. There does not seem to have been a definitive consensus as to whether the archangel merited this distinction. In other illuminations Gabriel also appears wearing different colors such as white or red; his iconography varies much more than Mary’s does. In almost all cases, however, he holds a banderole, a scroll denoting speech. This scroll contains his greeting to the Virgin, written in Latin: Ave Maria gratia plena Dominus tecum. This is also the start to the Hail Mary prayer, to be recited before starting the Matins hour.[7]

The last important image within the window on the illumination page is the architectural detail. In this particular example, Mary and Gabriel are clearly situated in a specific room. Details such as the floor tiles and the rounded window locate the Annunciation in an intimate space separated from the rest of the world. In the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, the Annunciation scene takes place in an even more architecturally complex space.[8] Gabriel enters an enclosed room, through a vaulted vestibule, one foot and wing trailing behind a column. There is a sense of perspective, and the room seems both intimate and exposed; the reader is very clearly looking into a private scene, through the removed fourth wall of the room. In both examples, the image draws the viewer into “sacred history”:[9] a world both distant and familiar.

The text underneath the window is an excerpt from Psalm 51. In English it roughly states: “Thou O Lord wilt open my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise.”[10] This quote is an introduction to prayer, like a wake-up call to the still-sleepy reader. The eye travels from this text, situated outside the window, to the banderole inside the window. The text therefore is like a bridge from the real world to the biblical world. When I started this project, one of my main research questions was about the foliate border around the page. I believe now that the imagery of the natural world emphasizes the transition from the real world to the biblical world that is facilitated by the text. I came to this conclusion after learning about the Flemish school of illumination, in which the stylized acanthus flowers of the French books[11] become extremely realistic tromp-l’oeil[12] images of blossoms and insects, looking as if they just happened to fall upon the page. This creates an exaggerated contrast between the mundane world of plants and animals, and the awe-inspiring, holy world of miracles. The reader must choose to enter into this more holy time and space as she begins her day and her prayer cycle.

In my re-imagining of the Annunciation illumination, I want to highlight two artistic choices that most deliberately differ from the original. First, I used real acorns and pressed flowers from around campus to make the border of my page. I wanted to heighten the contrast between the natural and the sacred even further, reminding the reader of the 3D physicality of the art object before her gaze moves to the interior window. I also made the choice to use flower petals to create Mary’s halo, an artistic choice with which I’m still struggling. I wanted to use the flower-halo to communicate Mary’s tie to the natural world—although she has connections to the divine, she is human. Her miracle—pregnancy and childbirth—is a very bodily and natural one, and I don’t think this can be ignored. On the other hand, the flower-halo is a departure from the intent of the original illumination, and possibly a confusion of the divide I intended to create between the border and the window.

The other alteration I made to the original illumination was using an English version of Psalm 51 and Hail Mary instead of Latin. I did this in an attempt to draw the viewer into the image. The original owner of the Book of Hours would have been memorizing Latin prayer since childhood, and would have felt very comforted by the Latin words. On the other hand, the viewers of my piece—my professor and classmates—are presumably more comfortable with English than with Latin. Therefore, it makes sense to use English instead, to recreate the sense of connection to the text.

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

 

Gardham, Judy, “Book of Hours.” Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department. 2006 Dec. http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/dec2006.html

Gunnhouse, Glenn. http://medievalist.net/hourstxt/home.htm

 Hand, Joni M. Women, Manuscripts and Identity in Northern Europe, 1350—1550. Surrey; Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013.

 Morrison, Elizabeth, and Anne D. Hedeman. Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting 1250-1500. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010.

 Pächt, Otto. Book Illumination in the Middle Ages: An Introduction. Translated by Dagmar Thoss and Ulrike Jenni. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

 Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours. London: The British Library, 2003.

 Robb, David M. The Art of the Illuminated Manuscript. Cranbury, NJ: A. S. Barnes and Co., Inc.: 1973.

 Wieck, Roger S., Sandra Hindman, and Ariane Bergeron-Foote. Picturing Piety: The Book of Hours. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2007.