Beschreibung:

FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, miniature cut from a Book of Hours, use of Rome in Latin, ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT ON VELLUM [central or northern France, perhaps Bourges, c.1500] 193 x 135mm (leaf): 111 x 92mm (miniature). In the right foreground St Joseph with a staff and bundle over his shoulder leads the donkey carrying the Virgin and naked Christchild in front of a grassy knoll, in the middle distance on the left the Massacre of the Innocents takes place along the road the Holy Family have just travelled, all painted in rich, sombre shades with gold highlighting, within a frame of liquid gold outlined in crimson, beneath the miniature but within the outer frame a large initial 'D' with monochrome grey staves on a ground of liquid gold, a stalk of strawberries in the infill, opens 5 lines of Vespers of the Office of the Virgin written in a bâtarde hand in black ink, rubrics in red, 4 one-line intials of liquid gold on grounds alternately blue or red (slight pigment losses to the sky and upper landscape, some cockling but without causing loss to the painted surface). Mounted. From a fine quality manuscript, the style of this miniature is closely related to the work of the Bourges illuminator known as the Master of the Lallement Boethius: F. Avril and N. Reynaud, Les Manuscrits à peintures en France 1440-1520 (Paris, 1994), pp.346-347. The solidly modelled drapery folds, the grey-shaded flesh tones and compact faces, and the setting of subsidiary action in the middle distance are all features that can be found in the work of this illuminator whose principal patron was Jean Lallement (d.1533) who was mayor of Bourges in 1500 and conseiller du roi and receveur général des finances de Normandie from 1494 to 1517.