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

Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art by Wieck, Roger S.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780807614198.

Featured here are some of the finest examples of illuminated pages from medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours. A "bestseller" for three hundred years, the Book of Hours was a devotional work that almost everyone owned and virtually knew by heart. The 107 glorious illuminations included in this volume are from The Pierpont Morgan Librarys collection, one of the worlds richest collections of the hand-painted book. Roger Wiecks comprehensive text explores two key elements of Books of Hours: the magnificent illuminations and the texts. Mr. Wieck also introduces these volumes to the general reader, with a discussion of their iconography, the artists who illuminated them, and their role as a religious text in the lives of their owners. As a collection of both stirring words and inspiring images, the Book of Hours thus comprised a series of "painted prayers." The illuminated pages shown here range from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and come from all the major manuscript-produ