[Scriptoris] Painted Prayers Exhibit at the Kimball

[M TURNAGE]

Greetings Scribes.

There is an exhibit coming to the Kimball Art Museum in Ft. Worth October 
12, 2003–January 18, 2004 called "Painted Prayers: Medieval and Reniassance 
Books of Hours from the Morgan Library."  Here is the write-up from the 
website.  This is one I won't miss.

In service,
Ceinwen~
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This exhibition features 58 of the finest manuscript and printed books of 
hours from the collections of the Pierpont Morgan Library—one of the richest 
repositories of such works in the world. Books of hours—prayer books used by 
ordinary men and women—were produced, by hand and by press, in greater 
quantities than any other type of book from the mid-thirteenth to the 
mid-sixteenth centuries. They were “bestsellers,” more popular than even the 
Bible. Among the primary vehicles of artistic expression, books of hours 
contain some of the most beautiful paintings and prints of the medieval and 
Renaissance periods.

Painted Prayers examines the iconography of books of hours, the artists who 
illustrated them, and the central role of the books as religious texts in 
the lives of their owners. More books of hours survive from the late Middle 
Ages than any other cultural artifact. Medieval life—and death—cannot be 
understood without examining this type of devotional work, owned, in various 
forms, by so many people and commonly known by heart. The prayers in books 
of hours, centered around the Mother of God, are the great literary 
expression of the cult of the Virgin Mary. They are also reflections of the 
society that produced them: from the frequent appearance of invocations to 
Saints Sebastian, Apollonia, and Margaret, for example, we learn something 
of the chronic problem of plague, the annoyance of toothache, and the 
dangers of childbirth.

Among the beautiful and representative works shown in the exhibition, two 
are particularly important. The luxuriant Hours of Catherine of Cleves (c. 
1440) is the greatest of all Dutch books of hours. The Hours of Cardinal 
Alessandro Farnese, completed in 1546 by Giulio Clovio, so dazzled Giorgio 
Vasari that in his Lives of the Artists (1568) he called this most famous 
manuscript of the Italian High Renaissance one of the “marvels of Rome.”

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