| Miniature in a French Book of Hours, Use of Rome, from the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth century, not among the suffrages to the saints but among the miscellaneous prayers, this one illustrating the Verses of Bernard. A crude portrait of Bernard by an artist with no knowledge of the Cistercian habit, Bernard is depicted in what looks like a white alb with a grey shawl or veil over his head at the end of which are tassels. He has an open book of psalms turned outwards in his right hand which he shows to a small black devil whom he holds on a chain with his left hand. The background consists of a mountainous landscape with a castle on top of a high cliff. Made for the owners whose monograms BL and BI (?) tied with a lover's knot appear 24 times in the borders of the manuscript. An almost identical miniature is found in a Book of Hours from 1510 (see MA296).
|
