Book of Hours: Description of Contents (3)

This is the painting in question:

    This painting is a damaged work of 15th century art.
    For a long time I was puzzled by this painting. I could see that it was damaged, but I could not imagine what it was. In particular, the curious blue object in the foreground was a complete mystery to me. Then I saw the following, taken from an earlier (c. 1440) use of Angers Book of Hours:

  Then the penny dropped, and I realised what this painting was! Like the earlier painting, it depicted the Procession to the Graveyard. The cityscape, the grouping of the people, the cross being held aloft by the figure on the extreme left, the position of the coffin, the colour of the funeral pall, the positioning of a coat of arms on the funeral pall - there could be little doubt, not only that this was a depiction of the same scene, but that the picture in my Book of Hours had been influenced by the earlier picture, or by another like it. In fact, the Procession to the Graveyard was a typical illustration accompanying the Office of the Dead.
    Such illustrations not infrequently included representations of skulls. Partly, this may have been a reference to the twelfth Station of the Cross (i.e., the story of Christ's Crucifixion), which takes place at Golgotha, "the place of the skull".

Looking very closely at the posts in the background of the painting, I found that the curious white markings about three quarters of the way up had black holes in them where eye-sockets would be on a skull. On the reverse of the painting (this is the only leaf in the text which has a blank verso) a later hand has added some comments in French.

Unfortunately, these have been largely worn away, but the words "St. Nicodesme" remain legible. The painting may, then, have been a reference to the martyrdom of Saint Nicodemus, or the skulls may simply have depicted a gruesome punishment of the kind carried out all too often during the fifteenth century.
    An interesting feature of this picture is the way in which it appears to have been built up from the background. The cityscape in the distance is perfectly detailed, but the crowd gathered round the coffin is in two different states of decomposition, and the extreme foreground is nothing more than a wash. It seems that, by laying down the background first, and, as it were, building the scene up from back to front, the artist gives a sense of depth to his work.
    The fact that the painting is damaged may be related to another very curious feature of this Book of Hours. The section which includes this painting (leaves 72v to 77r; the painting itself is leaf 73) is the Vespers of the Office of the Dead (beginning with the antiphon "Placebo", followed by Psalm 114 (in the Vulgate; 116 in the King James Bible), "Dilexi quoniam exaudiet dominus vocem orationis me[a]e" - "I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplications"), right up to to the oration, "Fidelium Deus" (77r). However, the Office of the Dead breaks off here.
    This does not apper to be a case of missing pages. The scribe dismisses the Office of the Dead with a  brief "et cetera", and announces, in red letters, "Inicium sancti evangelii

in secundum volumen" ("the start of the holy evangelist" [i.e. the Gospel According to St. John] "in the second volume" [i.e., the New Testament]; see picture, left). The Gospel Lesson of John ("In principio erat verbum" - "In the beginning was the Word"), which follows, conventionally comes at the beginning of a Book of Hours.
    Then, on the following leaf, comes an even more curious break in the text. The capitals on the page on the right in the picture below are written in a simpler style than those on the preceding page and all the others before it, with no gold, and no background illumination. The script is still in a Textus  Quadratus

Gothic hand, but is in a different hand from the preceding script. This script runs from leaves 79 to 120, and looks at first sight like a completely extraneous additon to the main text.
    In fact, however, the content of these leaves is closely related to the rest of the text. They contain the Matins and Lauds of the Office of the Dead, pre

cisely the sections which were omitted from the main text. The "Dirige" and "Verba Mea..." at the head of the page on the right are the opening antiphon and Psalm of the Matins,  and Lauds, the third and final part of the Office of the Dead, begins on leaf 105, with the antiphon "Exultabunt" and the Psalm "Miserere mei Deus..." Lauds ends on leaf 119r, and is followed, in a simpler hand, by a "Prayer to Jesus Christ".
    Then, on leaf 120 (see picture, left), there

is a return to the format which characterises the main part of this Book of Hours, though there is an obvious hiatus in the text and, again, there are slight calligraphical differences. The text of leaf 120 is the "Obsecro te" ("I beseech you"), a prayer to Mary that is found in most Books of Hours. This leaf and the following one are the only two in a square-foot Gothic hand to have no illuminated lettering.
    Clearly, there is some mystery here. How and why were the second and third parts of the Office of the Dead produced in this form? I can give no definitive answer, but there are several ways in which this might have happened, and these are explained on the next and final page of this account.