Illustrated Manuscripts

This striking Book of Hours was highly esteemed by its owner, the French-born king of Navarre, since his coat of arms is painted on some twenty-five folios of the manuscript. At this time Navarre was an independent kingdom in northeastern Spain straddling the Pyrenées. Despite its limited size, Navarre in the later Middle Ages played a fairly important international role. Its rulers had both blood and feudal ties with many other royal houses, most importantly that of France. Crowned in the Pamplona cathedral in 1389 as Charles III, the new king had to consolidate whatever he could from the disasters of his father's reign, and for a time he faced stupendous financial problems. By the early fifteenth century, however, he was flush with money and in a position to emulate the example of the French princes as a patron of the arts.

In terms of its page layout and overall design, the book conforms largely to Parisian standards, and indeed Paris was the center of the European book trade by 1405. The Hours of Charles the Noble was written for the use of the diocese of Paris. Yet the manuscript is also a work of international scope and points to the cosmopolitan character of the French capital at the height of what is known as the International Style in Gothic art. Its salient characteristics were courtly elegance and delicate naturalistic detail; it was also marked by a new interest in secular themes of aristocratic life, often with an artificially bucolic tone.

The evidence seems to suggest that Charles the Noble originally acquired this book, perhaps ready made for the luxury market, while on one of his four trips to Paris--probably that of 1404-5. Although there is a relative aesthetic harmony to the book's decoration, the illumination is clearly a collaborative effort involving an international team of artists working in the French capital. The Hours of Charles the Noble shows evidence of at least six artistic hands: two Italians, two Parisians, and two Netherlanders. The illuminator who planned the decoration and produced seventeen of its large miniatures was a Bolognese artist who is rather misleadingly known as the Master of the Brussels Initials, named after another manuscript to which he contributed, now in Brussels. His principal assistant was a Florentine known by the name Zecho, which he inscribed on folio 201 verso of the manuscript. Zecho was evidently responsible for most of the decoration in the manuscript's margins. We know nothing about the circumstances under which these artists worked, nor how such disparate painters came to Paris at the start of the fifteenth century to work on a common project. We do know that such collaborative efforts were not uncommon; the outcome in this case at least is a sumptuous illuminated manuscript of truly international proportions. Stylistically, the Hours of Charles the Noble represents one of the most remarkable fusions of French and Italian taste ever achieved.