How disappointing when such a reputable institution as the Getty Museum, itself the repository of significant illuminated manuscripts and a venue for exemplary manuscript exhibitions, publishes such a compromised book on illuminated books of hours. Fanny Fay-Sallois's A Treasury of Hours: Selections from Illuminated Prayer Books reproduces sixty full-page images from a variety of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, largely of French origin, and located today mostly in French collections. This small-format, beautifully designed book certainly intends to appeal to a lay audience: to seduce readers via high-quality, colorful imagery, and then use short commentaries to help explain this fascinating world of medieval prayer books. This user-friendly publication, well-balanced in image and text, succeeds visually, yet the disappointing commentary makes one wonder why the Getty would even consider publishing it.
Following Dominique Ponnau's enthusiastic preface come sixty pages from a variety of books of hours, each described and explained by a short text on the facing page, and arranged in the order typically found in prayer books. Thus Fay-Sallois includes, for example, several calendar pages and portraits of the Gospel authors, followed by the most common illuminations that accompany the Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Passion, and Hours of the Holy Spirit, along with those used for the Office of the Dead, the Hours of the John the Baptist, and the Suffrages of the Saints. These are followed by a brief "Vocabulary and Short History of Princes, Books and Artists," an unusual glossary that alphabetizes in a single list a hodgepodge of entries (interspersing terms such as "nimbus" and "flourish" with brief artists' biographies and summary catalogue information on each manuscript); a checklist of the manuscripts with their current locations; and a short bibliography. Certainly not a scholarly tome, the book might best be described as a gift book.
Fanny Fay-Sallois, not an art historian but here identified as a "historian and iconographer," originally published this book in French in 2001; this English translation was done for the Getty in 2005. Yet the writing is weak--one wonders what age audience it is intended for- -and the content ranges from interesting to fanciful to wrong. The author's most intriguing suggestion is that the motto of the Marshal of Boucicaut, "ce que vous voudres" ("what thou wilt"), reflects Christ's words of acquiescence in the Garden of Gethsemane (123); yet oddly, when Fay-Sallois first notes the phrase's inclusion in the manuscript, on a page illustrating The Trinity, she relates it only to Christ, and fails to identify it as the patron's own motto (82). Only in her "Vocabulary and Short History" does she suggest its larger meaning. More mystifyingly, the author identifies relatively commonplace pink and blue winged figures (most would identify these as angels or perhaps more ambiguously as putti) as "pink cherubs with black wings and black devils with pink wings" (16); St. Mathew's traditional attribute--the winged man or angel--becomes "a charming little angel" who "watches over" him (26); and the author portrait of St. Luke with his similarly traditional lion as attribute, set in a Gothic room with a doorway view of a solidly cobbled street with typically French-style architecture beyond it, elicits this startling commentary: "A lion? A canal? We are in Venice." A belt is misidentified as a rosary (36); the Flight into Egypt now occurs after Herod's commandment to murder the newborns, rather than before (as in Matt. 2: 13-16), and the falling statue included therein symbolizes the change from the "Old Dispensation to the New" (46). This last statement, while not erroneous, represents a sin of omission: most historians of medieval art would immediately recognize this self-toppling idol, a motif popularly recurring in scenes of the Flight into Egypt, as deriving directly from an apocryphal account wherein pagan idols in Egypt commit suicide, in recognition of Christ's superiority.[1] The Jew Caiaphas is misidentified as "perhaps" the Roman governor Pilate (62); traditional ivy leaf borders are confused with grape leaves (98); an absolutely flat cityscape, filled with French Gothic architecture and set behind a broad lake with boats and swans, apparently "evokes Assisi," that steep Umbrian hill town; St. Anthony's Fire is misidentified as shingles instead of ergotism; the standard INRI ("Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum") becomes inexplicably "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judocrum"; and Romanesque architecture with monochrome windows is transformed into a "superb Gothic cathedral" with stained glass (110).
Perhaps more disturbing than these errors and cavalier statements are the obvious omissions, and not only of the specific information which any of a number of fine scholars could have offered to accompany these miniatures. Beyond that, A Treasury of Hours fails to communicate any real sense of how a book of hours functioned in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe. While the miniatures are displayed in book order, the adjacent text lacks a clear explanation of how lay persons--especially women--used and treasured these books, how the Hours of the Passion would be consulted at certain liturgical times of the year, and the Office of the Dead in times of illness and death. The brief listing under "Book of Hours" in the glossary (121), while noting and listing the eight hours of the day, certainly does not suffice to explain the remarkable popularity and functionality of these manuscripts. The bibliography lists thirty-four publications for further study, yet oddly--in a book intended for a lay, American audience--fewer than ten in English. Numerous fine publications exist in English on books of hours; the editors should have insisted that the bibliography be reworked with an English-speaking public in mind, a quick and easy task.
Art historians today face dwindling numbers of publishers and reduced funding for art historical books. The Getty should be chastised for supporting a project like this: one that purports to educate the public, but does so in such a patronizing and misguided way. A Treasury of Hours represents a lost opportunity to engage interested non-scholars in the richly meaningful world of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, a culture with resonance for our own but increasingly and unnecessarily distanced from it.
Notes:
1. See Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971, I, 117-18, for her summary of the Evangelium of the Pseudo Matthew.