Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany

It has been described by John Harthan as "one of the most magnificent Books of Hours ever made",[1][note 1] and is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogued as Ms lat.

[2] The full-page miniatures have large figures in an advanced Renaissance style for France at this date, drawing on both Italian and Flemish painting, and with well-developed perspective.

[7] Despite the general "sweetness of Bourdichon's style",[8] the work contains gruesome images of the mass martyrdoms of Saint Ursula's eleven thousand virgin companions and the Theban Legion, though rather characteristically both show moments after the action and contain relatively little movement.

The small animals represented are snakes, lizards, slow worms, frogs, turtles, squirrels, snails, rabbits, monkeys and spiders.

The style borrows from the elaborate and realistic borders of natural life developed in the preceding decades by Flemish illuminators, but unlike them Bourdichon generally treats only one species on a page, and often shows roots and bulbs, and labels each page with the plant's name in Latin and French, in the manner of a florilegium or a herbal (a book on medicinal plants).

After many more pregnancies and stillborn children, at her death in 1514 Anne left two daughters, of whom Claude married François I, the cousin who succeeded to the throne.

[11] Jean Bourdichon had already been the artist of the Louis XII Book of Hours for the king (parts in various collections) some years earlier, probably beginning it in 1498.

According to a letter from the queen written in March 1508, Jean Bourdichon, who was one of the main artists regularly working for the court, was paid the sum of 1500 livres tournois in the form of 600 écus, although it seems the payment was not made for several years.

Anthony Blunt noted that "Many of his designs – for instance the 'St Sebastian' – look in reproduction like altarpieces rather than miniatures; and to this extent his art represents the decay of true illumination".

[15] However, royalty and the grandest other patrons continued to commission manuscripts for several further decades, and in some cases well after that, and the miniatures of the Grandes Heures are integrated with the texts of the book in the traditional ways.