Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art

by Roger S. Wieck

Featured here are some of the finest examples of illuminated pages from medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours. A "bestseller" for three hundred years, the Book of Hours was a devotional work that almost everyone owned and virtually knew by heart. The 107 glorious illuminations included in this volume are from The Pierpont Morgan Library's collection, one of the world's richest collections of the hand-painted book. Roger Wieck's comprehensive text explores two key elements of Books of the magnificent illuminations and the texts. Mr. Wieck also introduces these volumes to the general reader, with a discussion of their iconography, the artists who illuminated them, and their role as a religious text in the lives of their owners. As a collection of both stirring words and inspiring images, the Book of Hours thus comprised a series of "painted prayers." The illuminated pages shown here range from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and come from all the major manuscript-produ

Genres: Art, Medieval, Art History, History

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Roger S. Wieck is the Melvin R. Seiden Curator and Department Head of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. He has also held curatorial positions at the Walters Art Museum and the Houghton Library of Harvard University.

Reviews

[Tracy]

A beautiful book that explains each of the sections of medieval horae and then provides numerous full-color illustrations from horae that are in the Getty collection. The descriptions provide a nice entry into understanding books of hours.

[Lauren]

Graduate textbook for a seminar on rare books, looking at illuminated manuscripts and medieval texts specifically.