Great Canterbury Psalter

At that time this workshop was a hive of activity thanks to a fascinating and ambitious project: a triple Psalter featuring the Latin, Hebrew and Gallican versions of the Psalms in addition to glosses in Norman French, the French dialect spoken in England for three centuries following the Norman conquest, as the educated language and the one preferred by the court and the upper classes.

They created four full-page, illuminated folios giving a dazzling prologue providing a detailed summary of the history of humanity according to the scriptures in fabulous images.

The spectacular nature of the project, the splendour of the manuscript and the lavish use of gold suggest it may have been a psalter for a king: Henry II himself, Louis VII of France or even Philip Augustus in the early years of his reign.

[4]The English artists created a universe brimming with unusual scenes whose singularity and complex symbolism made them difficult to interpret.

[7] It is highly likely that Pedro the Ceremonious[8] insisted on Ferrer Bassa completing this spectacular psalter for him whilst respecting its sumptuous lavishness.

In the second part of the manuscript, Ferrer Bassa's brushstrokes reinterpret the Byzantine dimension of English painting with greater artistic licence, revealing a thorough knowledge of trecentist pictorial resources.

Ferrer Bassa, considered to be the finest painter in Aragon in the 14th century, developed a personality of his own, clearly marked by the Tuscan styles of the Trecento, particularly those of Florence and Siena with which he was so familiar.

This rich, artistic amalgam was to merge, more than a century later, with the finest, Italianate Gothic introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by Ferrer Bassa.

This convergence of the two different figurative cultures of England and Catalonia, more than one hundred years apart, is one of the most important features of the codex, a facet that makes it unique in the history of art.

It probably belonged to Jean, duc de Berry and the first female bibliophile in history, Margaret of Austria, who bequeathed it to Mary of Hungary, Emperor Charles V's sister.