The secondary decoration, namely the decorated initials and margins, in this elegant Book of Hours can be ascribed to Parisian production around 1380- 90. The first fourteen illuminations in the manuscript, starting with the Annunciation (fol. 18), seem to have been outlined (e.g. in the decoration of the backgrounds on fols. 122 and 129) by the Maître du Policratique de Charles V, an illuminator who was very fashionable in Paris between around 1366 and 1403 and was much in demand among various members of the court of Valois, including King Charles V for whom the artist produced his eponymous work in 1372 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. fr. 24287).¹ For unknown reasons, these fourteen illuminations were left unfinished and completed by a second hand. The page with the Annunciation, which opens the Matins in the Hours of the Virgin, features the initial “D”, of “Domine labia mea aperies” with the parchment left blank, for the purpose of being embellished with the coat of arms of the first owner of the manuscript, who was not necessarily the person who commissioned it - a wealthy middleclass woman of unknown identity who was presumably a widow (as suggested by the colors of her dress), depicted on fol. 144 (it is worth noting that the Obsecro te on fols. 137-140 uses the masculine gender). The illumination on fol. 144, which shows an Engelspietà surrounded by instruments of the Passion, was indeed added after the initial decorative campaign on the manuscript. It can be attributed to the so-called Maître des Heures Mazarine, a sort of alter ego of the Maître du Maréchal de Boucicaut, who dominated the Parisian art scene in the first quarter of the 15th century.² The theme of the dead Christ held up in front of the tomb by one or two angels, indicated as “Pitié Nostre Seigneur” in documents from the time of Charles V and Charles VI, and that in the Book of Hours in the Cerruti Collection opens the prayer Deus qui voluisti dedicated to the Redeemer, was very widespread in the most varied forms of art produced in the French capital between the 14th and 15th century,³ including (to keep with illuminated manuscripts) the Book of Hours of Jeanne Bessonneau, a late work of the Maître de Boucicaut (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. lat. 1161, fol. 27).⁴ 

Giovanna Saroni 

¹ This manuscript has been digitalised: https://archivesetmanuscrits. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc785051. On the Maître du Policratique de Charles V (perhaps identifiable as Antoine de Compiègne) see F. Avril, “Le parcours exemplaire d’un enlumineur parisien à la fin du XIVe siècle. La carrière et l’oeuvre du Maître du Policratique de Charles V”, in Fleith, Morenzoni 2001, pp. 265-282; F. Avril, E. Taburet-Delahaye, “Persistances et traditions dans la création artistique”, in Paris 2004a, pp. 45-46. 

² François Avril and Gabrielle Bartz associated part of the rich corpus of illustrations traditionally attributed to the Maître de Boucicaut with a second artist, namely the Maître de la Mazarine, so-called after his main work, the Book of Hours MS. 469 at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris (F. Avril, “Le Livre des Merveilles, manuscrit fr. 2810 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France”, in Avril et al. 1996, pp. 291-324; Bartz 1999; Villela-Petit 2001, pp. 80-92). In her monograph on the artist, Gabrielle Bartz does not mention the Cerruti Book of Hours purchased from Günther in 2011, because the manuscript had evidently not yet reappeared on the market. 

³ I. Villela-Petit, “Nouvelles dévotions”, in Paris 2004a, pp. 245-246. 

⁴ I. Villela-Petit, cat. 173, in Paris 2004a, pp. 282- 283. The manuscript can be consulted online: https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10515743q.