Art Word of the Day: Book of hours

artopium (66)in #wordsoftheday • 5 years ago

Term: Book of hours

Definition: A book for private devotions

containing prayers for different hours of the day. Each book of hours is a a collection of texts for each liturgical hour of the day, along with other texts such as calendars, prayers, psalms and masses for holy days. Often these books were richly illustrated with illuminations. A classic book of hours is Les Tres Riches Heures, one of the great art treasures of France, the greatest achievement of the art of manuscript illumination. It was painted by Paul, Hermann and Jean Limbourg (brothers, Flemish, each c. 1380-1416), 1412-1416, for the very wealthy Duke of Berry, a brother to a king and other dukes. The Limbourgs used a variety of colors obtained from minerals, plants or chemicals, mixed with either gum arabic or gum acacia to provide a binder for the paint. Among the more unusual colors they used were vert de flambe, a green obtained from crushed flowers mixed with massicot, and azur d'outreme, an ultramarine made from crushed Middle Eastern lapis-lazuli, used to paint the intense blues, and extremely expensive. The fine detail which was characteristic of the Limbourgs demanded extremely fine brushes and, almost certainly, magnifying lenses.Another example: Master of the Old Prayerbook of Maximilian I and Associates (Flemish, Ghent), The Hours of Queen Isabella of Spain, c. 1497-1500, ink, tempera, and gold on vellum, 8 7/8 x 6 inches (22.5 x 15.2 cm), Cleveland Museum of Art. This was a gift to the queen who helped Christopher Columbus to make his historic voyage across the Atlantic a few years before the book was produced.Also see bestiary, incunabulum, and miniature.

Art Word of the Day

Every day I make an attempt to add a little bit more art knowledge to the Internet, one word at a time. Realizing there aren’t many comprehensive and complete online art dictionaries, I set out on a mission to compile my own.

Please be sure to check out these other projects

Visit Artopium.com a website dedicated to helping artists sell their works.

Read "What is Artopium?" on Steemit

Download the Brave Browser and get $5 in the cryptocurrency BAT!!

The Brave Browser pays you in BAT (Basic Attention Token) to allow them to display their ads, which you can then use the BAT you earn to tip content creators or just exchange for another crypto. I'm making about $15 a month just from the ads, which are very non-intrusive, and all while simply using the Internet as I normally would. Brave comes with a built in script blocker and ad blocker so it's also very fast and very safe. I opened Firefox the other day and regretfully remembered what a monster it is on resources.

If you download and use Brave as your Internet browser using this link we both get $5 in BAT!!
https://brave.com/art085