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

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807614572 ISBN 13: 9780807614570

Publisher: George Braziller, 1999

This book features 107 of the finest examples of illuminated pages from medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours. Roger Wieck's comprehensive text introduces the Book of Hours--a "bestseller" for three hundred years--to the general reader, discussing its iconography, the artists who illuminated this genre, and its role as a religious text in the lives of its owners. As a collection of both stirring words and inspiring images, the Book of Hours thus comprised a series of "painted prayers."

Review:

If this sparkling book contained only its crystalline reproductions of illuminated manuscripts, it would satisfy most lovers of these charming miniatures. But Roger S. Wieck, curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, is the most entertaining of authors. His enthusiasm for what he dubs "the Medieval best-seller" is thoroughly infectious. "Books of Hours linked church and home," he writes. "The entire celestial court, God and his cosmos, could be held within the palms of one's hands." Wieck has turned his scholarly, historical material into a page-turner. Given the hypnotic beauty of the manuscripts themselves, with all their flayings, blessings, betrayals, and epiphanies, Painted Prayers should be a bestseller in its own right.

About the Author:

Roger S. Wieck is Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. He is the author of Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life and Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350-1525, in the Houghton Library.