The Prayer Book and the World of AD 1500Professor Emerita Michelle P. Brown

The Rothschild Prayerbook

made in Ghent / Bruges c.1500-1520 for an unknown patron by leading Flemish artists ‘The Master of the First Prayerbook of Maximilian’, Gerard

Horenbout (‘Master of James IV of Scotland), Gerard David and Simon Bening

(Kerry Stokes Collection)

The contents of the book, which has extra mass texts and prayers beyond those usually found in a book of hours, contain distinctive elements that relate it to the Chartreuse des Dunes, near Bruges.

By 1500 the printed book of hours had largely replaced manuscript ones, except for luxury books like this, which were restricted to the higher nobility and royalty. The manuscript belonged to the princely Wittelsbach family in the 16th century, and then to the library of the counts palatine in Heidelberg, leaving that collection before 1623.

Its history is then unknown until it reappeared in the collection of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family in the late 19th century. It was confiscated from Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild immediately after the March 1938 German annexation of Austria and passed to the National Library of Austria until returned to the Rothschild family in 1999. It was sold by them at Christies that year for a record $13 million and again in 2014 for £8,195,783 to Australian media magnate Kerry Stokes

German Gradual 1512, illuminator Nicolaus Bertschi with his wife, Margaret

Gerard David, a leading Flemish miniaturist and panel-painter,self-portrait c.1509

Calendar by Simon Bening,The Golf Book, BL

Illuminator William de Brailes, from the de Brailes Hours, the first full book of hours, Oxford 1240s

Catte St, Oxford, site of the premises of William and his wife Selina

Menorah with Hebrew micrography, The King’s Bible, Solsona, 1384. British Library, King’s 1, f. 3.

The St John’s BibleDonald Jackson, The Scriptorium, Hendre, Wales When I was a nine year old, desire led me to copy ancient

scripts and decorated letters. I loved the feel of the pen as it touched the page and the breathtaking effect of coloured ink as its wetness caught the light. Those sensations, which I still experience as I work, are what seem to direct the shapes and colours of my designs and letters. The quill and the brush, not my conscious thinking, make the choice.

The continual process of opening up and accepting what may reveal itself through hand and heart on a crafted page is the closest I have ever come to God.

The Ghent Altarpiece, 1430s, by the Van Eycks

Vincent de Beauvais,Speculum, bought in Flandersby Edward IV

Babel, from a breviary for the wealthy Venetian Grimani family, made by the same team as the Rothschild Prayerbook in Ghent / Bruges, c.1515-1520 (San Marco, Venice)

Arrest of Christ by Simon Bening, Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (Getty)

Labours of the Months by Simon Bening, V&A

Flemish Hours, Sarum Use, c.1450-1470

Hours of Richard III, made in London in the 1420s, which probably accompanied him to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485

Hours of Mary of BurgundyFlanders 1477

Sforza Hours by Birago and Horenbout, 1490-1520

Leonardo’s Last Supper, Milan, 1490s

Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man

Leonardo’s experiments with flight,1483

Columbus' handwritten notes in Latin, on the margins of his copy of The Travels of Marco Polo

Columbus map, drawn c. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus

1497 Polish astrnomer / mathematician Copernicus begins experiments in Bologna to prove heliocentric system, placing the sun rather than earth at the centre of the universe

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, S. Netherlands, c.1505

Book of Motets made in S. Netherlands for Henry VIII, 1516

Wycliffe Bible, London c.1400

Portrait after Cranach of Martin Luther, who ignited the Protestant Reformation with his 96 theses in 1517

Tyndale BiblePrinted in Worms1526

Holbein’s 1523 portrait of Dutch Humanist scholar priest Erasmus, who charted a middle course amidst the Catholic and Protestant disputes

Henry VIII as King David, with his fool Will Somers, in the Psalter he commissioned from French illuminator Jean Mallard c.1540

Self-portrait of Simon Bening, son of Alexander, painted in his 75th year, 1558

Portrait of Elizabeth I by Levina Teerlinc,one of Simon Bening’s six daughters, c.1565