Digitized Demons
The Morgan Library in New York is exhibiting the wonderful illuminated manuscript The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, and has also digitized all of the miniatures.
This digital facsimile provides reproductions of all 157 miniatures (and facing text pages) from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. The original one-volume prayer book had been taken apart in the nineteenth century; the leaves were shuffled and then rebound into two confusing volumes. This presentation offers the miniatures in their original, fifteenth-century sequence.
The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is the greatest Dutch illuminated manuscript in the world. Its 157 miniatures are by the gifted Master of Catherine of Cleves (active ca. 1435-60), who is named after this book. The Master of Catherine of Cleves is considered the finest and most original illuminator of the medieval northern Netherlands, and this manuscript is his masterpiece.
The images are simply chock-full of little demons (illustrating that the devil really is in the details). The scans are fairly high-resolution, and they’d be wonderful source material for all kinds of projects.
Posted in Resources | 2 Comments »
June 21st, 2016 at 11:44 am
Excellently entertaining little demons! So much more inventive than the modern sort.
June 21st, 2016 at 2:47 pm
Apparently it was pretty common for monks in the middle ages to put things like fast jokes and killer rabbits (seriously) in the margins of manuscripts they were illuminating.