Isabella Breviary
The work known as the breviary of Isabella I of Castile is a Breviarium Romanum made in Flanders for a Castilian nobleman Francisco de Rojas near the end of the 15th century.
He negotiated the marriage between Infante Juan, the Crown Prince, and Margaret of Austria and Philip the Handsome and Infanta Joanna of Castile.
The marriage of Joanna and Philip took place on 20 October 1496 in Lier and that of Juan and Margaret on 3 April 1497 in Burgos.
Furthermore, the manuscript has twelve calendar pages, one full-page miniature and a folio with coats of arms and mottos on banners.
Its larger format further distinguished the Isabella Breviary by accommodating a completely different illumination program.
[m 2] Many breviaries were highly decorated and were a symbol of status but often they serve very few practical purposes as they were expensive, heavy and difficult to transport without damaging them.
[a 3] After the death of Dent in 1826, his collection was sold in 1827 at an auction held by Robert Harding Evans and in the catalogue four pages were devoted to the Breviary.
In this catalogue that a faulty interpretation of the text of Francisco Rojas was given; it led to the story that the book was in honour of Isabella's support for the expedition of Christopher Columbus.
The breviary was a collection of all the prayers that were needed to recite the daily office The first occurrence of a single manuscript of the daily office was written by the Benedictine order at Monte Cassino in Italy in 1099 but the real breakthrough came with the advent of the mendicant friars who travelled around a lot and needed a shortened, or abbreviated, daily office contained in one portable book The Isabella Breviary contains the standard sections of a Dominican breviary as they were established by Hubert de Romans, superior of the order between 1254 and 1277 (for details see the list hereunder).
The temporal specifies the prayers to be recited for the daily hours of the Divine Office: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.
The prayers consist of psalms, antiphons, versicles, responses, hymns, readings from the Old and New Testaments, sermons of the Fathers and the like.
When one tries to read the temporal or the sanctoral it will be noted that the office for Sundays and major holidays start with the Vespers of the previous day.
In the second phase the scribe continued with the summer part of the temporal, followed by a complete sanctoral and the remaining sections.
In the winter part of the Temporal de page-wide miniatures are used for the main Sundays and for the feast days in the week.
Lesser Sundays are illustrated with a column-wide miniature and weekdays with a partial border and a large ornamental initial.
[m 5] The manuscript contains a number of miniatures that are page wide and 24 lines high except a couple of them in the Sanctoral.
The second, third and fourth Sunday of the advent for example are marked with a miniature of 13 or 14 lines high and a four-sided border decoration.
The important feast days in the Christmastide are Christmas, the Circumcision of Jesus and the Adoration of the Magi, which are illustrated by a page-wide miniature.
The Sundays after the octave of the Epiphany and the beginning of the Easter cycle are indicated by an initial of eight lines high and a three-sided margin decoration.
Also here, small pictures were used as a kind of bookmarks but also to illustrate the symbols of the saint with possibly a representation of his martyrdom, or a special event in his life.
The calendar miniatures are not a part of the hierarchical system described above, they are not intended to structure or clarify the text, but are purely decorative.
In the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the Limbourg Brothers used full-page miniatures of the works of the month facing the calendar page.
Their invention was scarcely followed by other artists until it was picked up by Flemish painters in the beginning of the sixteenth century as for example in the Grimani Breviary.
All the characters are drawn with blue or purple ink on a gold ground, and parts of the initials are decorated with geometric motifs in white.
[n 25] If the line is ending with a blank space, this is filled with a gold bar which buds, tendrils or geometric motifs.
Until recently, his work in the manuscript was dated according to the inscription on folio 437r around the time of the double marriage and the presence of Francisco de Rojas in Flanders, thus in the 1490s.
The illuminator who painted the calendar was also involved in the realisation of the border decoration in the Ghent-Bruges style variant 1, with the broad acanthus branches.
In any case it is recognised more and more that Gerard David played an important role in the late miniature art in Flanders.
Detailed study learns that the foreground and background of the St. Barbara (f297r) have been painted with different techniques[a 16] and that is also the case for the left part of the landscape on the miniature of John (f09r).
The Master of James IV of Scotland was responsible for 48 miniatures in the second part of the Isabella Breviary,[n 26] the second half of the Sanctoral.
