Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany

It has been described by John Harthan as "one of the most magnificent Books of Hours ever made", The name means "The Large Hours" as opposed to her "Small Hours" and "Very Small Hours"; the mixed French and English of the name is usual in English sources. And is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogued as Ms lat. It has 49 full-page miniatures in a Renaissance style, and more than 300 pages have large borders illustrated with a careful depiction of, usually, a single species of plant.

• Illustration — Saint Martin, f. 189v-190r The book is large for a book of hours at 30.5 cm by 20 cm, and consists of 476 pages including 49 full-page miniatures, 12 calendar pages with genre scenes of the months of the year, two pages of Anne's heraldic devices, and 337 pages with illuminated borders showing flowers and other plants. The full-page miniatures have large figures in an advanced Renaissance style for France at this date, drawing on both Italian and Flemish painting, and with well-developed perspective. There are gold highlights on the figures, a technique taken from Bourdichon's master Jean Fouquet, and the miniatures are framed with imitation gilded wood picture frames of the type found in Early Netherlandish painting, a style Bourdichon used in some other miniatures. For another example, see:File:Bnf059.jpg from Jean Marot, Le Voyage de Gênes (Voyage to Genoa), Tours, around 1508, BnF MS Fr. 5091. Similar frames surround the miniatures of the Sforza Hours, begun in Italy in the 1490s. Outside the frames the edges of these pages are painted plain black. Some landscape backgrounds suggest a knowledge of the sfumato style of Leonardo da Vinci. In particular specific borrowings from the architecture of Bramante and the painting of Perugino suggest that Bourdichon may have made an unrecorded visit to Italy. There is a donor portrait of Anne at prayer, presented by her patron saints to the dead Christ held by the Virgin Mary in a Pietà on the facing page, the Virgin meeting Anne's gaze. Night-scenes include a famous Annunciation to the Shepherds and the Nativity. Despite the general "sweetness of Bourdichon's style", the work contains gruesome images of the mass martyrdoms of Saint Ursula's eleven thousand virgin companions and the Theban Legion, though rather characteristically both show moments after the action and contain relatively little movement. Scenes from the Life of Christ and that of the Virgin are depicted as well as a number of portraits and scenes of saints. F. 197v has the rare scene of the Virgin Mary being taught how to read by Saint Anne, who is seated on a dais like a medieval professor. • Illustration — Annunciation to the Shepherds, f. 58v • Illustration — The floral borders opposite the shepherds, f. 59, with Solanum dulcamara The book is also remarkable for its realistic representations of 337 plants in the borders that most text pages are given. There are flowers, cultivated and wild, shrubs, some trees and among the plants a wide variety of insects and small animals of the countryside. The plants include Cannabis sativa on f. 90v, and the major cereal crops of the day on ff. 94–96. The insects represented are butterflies and moths, dragonflies, grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetles, flies, carpenter bees, crickets, earwigs, bees and beetles. The small animals represented are snakes, lizards, slow worms, frogs, turtles, squirrels, snails, rabbits, monkeys and spiders. The style borrows from the elaborate and realistic borders of natural life developed in the preceding decades by Flemish illuminators, but unlike them Bourdichon generally treats only one species on a page, and often shows roots and bulbs, and labels each page with the plant's name in Latin and French, in the manner of a florilegium or a herbal (a book on medicinal plants). In most pages the border is a single panel to the outside of the text, but in others it surrounds the text on all four sides. The plants are shown as if laid out on a plain coloured surface, upon which they cast a shadow. In 1894 Giulio Camus wrote an account of the plants in the work, and a full modern facsimile was published in 2008. There are 395 images from the book available online through the BnF.See external links for the facsimile and the online images.