Hours of Louis XII

It was begun in 1498 or 1499, going by the king's age of 36 given below his portrait; he became king on 7 April 1498. The book reached England, where it was broken up around 1700. Now only parts of it survive – in total sixteen full-page miniature paintings (four are calendar pages), two sheets of text and fifty-one sheets of text bound in the wrong order as a thin volume (the last in the British Library since 1757). The pages with miniatures are now in the Getty Museum (3), the Free Library of Philadelphia (4 calendar pages), British Library (3, plus most text pages), and with one each: National Library of Scotland, Musée Marmottan Paris, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Louvre Museum and a private collection in London. All but one of these were reunited for an exhibition in 2005–2006 at the Getty Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum. • Illustration — June calendar page, Philadelphia. Haymaker, and the sign of Cancer Janet Backhouse, of the British Library, first proposed in 1973 that the three miniatures and bound text pages in the library were part of a major manuscript that had also contained four other miniatures that had only recently resurfaced. Gradually more miniatures were identified, and some purchased by the Getty Museum, Louvre, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Several pages have come to light in recent decades, and more may yet emerge. The Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, Louis's queen, also illuminated by Jean Bourdichon, provide a comparison, although this is slightly later, from between 1503 and 1508, and on an even more grand scale.

• Illustration — Adoration of the Magi (Louvre) The page size is 10 3/4 by inches. The text pages have a panel of "crisply painted" flowers and insects, together with coloured acanthus decoration, running at the side of the text. The plants are somewhat realistically painted, but less so than in the queen's hours, which are distinctive for the large number of different plants shown. The naturalism is rather reduced by the brightly coloured acanthus leaves being depicted as part of whichever plant is shown, and the insects are not very naturalistic. Initials beginning a line have formalized floral decoration, and line-fillers are a mixture of geometrical and budding branch decoration. There are only 18 lines of text per page, leaving generous margins, especially at the bottom of the page. The miniatures have text pages on the reverse, and the distinctive form of the border block has confirmed which miniatures belong to the book. The full-page miniatures, except for the calendar, are given fictive frames, plain with a bevel, painted naturalistically to resemble gilded wood. The text inscribed on the bottom of the frames of most miniatures is the start of the next text section, which continues over the page. The standard arrangement of a book of hours, though somewhat variable, allows the sequence of the original volume to be reconstructed with some confidence, helped by the texts at the bottom and versos of miniature pages. The calendar, showing the astrological sign of the Zodiac for the month, and the appropriate one of the Labours of the Months, would have followed the portrait opening. Each month has the recto and verso of a single folio. Every day has a saint's feast day named, alternating in red and blue ink, with the most important in gold. In the four months currently known, February shows a middle-aged man about to dine in "bourgeois comfort", June a haymaker with a scythe, and a whetstone in his belt, August a worker winnowing grain in a barn, and September a man treading grapes for winemaking. The miniature of Saint Luke the Evangelist writing his gospel (now in Edinburgh) was probably one of four evangelist portraits introducing extracts from each gospel in the text, not uncommon in books of hours. Next of the surviving miniatures was probably the Betrayal of Christ (Musée Marmottan), introducing the Passion according to John, though the placing of this section varies. Six of what would have been nine pages with a cycle of the "Infancy of Christ" from the life of the Virgin survive. These would have been with the "Hours of the Virgin" text. The Annunciation would have been across two facing pages, of which the Virgin on the right is in the British Library, while the Archangel Gabriel to the left is missing. The remaining miniatures would have introduced other sections of the text: Pentecost (British Library) the "Short Hours of the Holy Spirit"; Bathsheba bathing (Getty Museum) the Penitential Psalms; Job on the Dungheap (British Library) the Office of the Dead.