Prayer Book of Claude de France

Around 1517, a small, enchanting picture book emerged at the court of the French King, that was famous due to its format and its unusual richness of colored pictorial decoration. This was the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France, which was completed by her personal favorite painter. Named the Master of Claude de France after this work, he painted 132 scenes on 104 pages from the New Testament. The small format pictures are especially captivating because of the fine manner of painting and the depiction of the queen’s personal symbols. The pictures are inspired from the art of the painters of Italy, especially Leonardo de Vinci.

A Coronation Present for the Art Lover

Claude de France, daughter of Anne de Bretagne and Louis XII, came from a family that was known in medieval France as lovers and patrons of the fine arts. She grew up surrounded by valuable paintings and manuscripts. In 1514, she married the man who later became King Francois I, who was likewise known as a patron of the arts and who kept in touch with the Italian Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. At her coronation in 1517, Claude wished for a personal gift, a small prayer book that she could carry with her. Her favorite painter designed the work and employed the Queen’s personal coat-of-arms three times, which are highlighted with golden crowns on two of the depictions.

An Amazing Richness of Illustration in a Small Format

The Miniatures of the prayer book measure only 69 x 49 millimeters. In spite of this small format, the Master of Claude de France succeeds in reviving biblical scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and numerous other saints. The book consists almost entirely of pictures, which mostly fill whole pages and sometimes double pages as well. The textual part of the work is very limited. Sometimes the textual passages were broken up by incised pictorial scenes that depicted the portrayed events and made the gaily colored booklet even more lively.

A Famous Template and an Uncertain History

The history of the French payer book is no longer explicable today. The Viennese book dealer H.P. Kraus acquired the text after the Second World War and sold it at the end of the 1970’s to the New York art collector Alexandre P. Rosenburg. His widow bequeathed the work to the Pierpont Morgan Library 21 years later. The earlier stages of the prayer book are not known. What is known is that Claude’s husband Francois I was a great lover of Italian painting. He acquired works from Michelangelo, Titian, and Raffael as well as sending for his friend Leonardo da Vinci at his famous Renaissance court of Amboise. His popular depiction of the “Virgin of the Rocks” had a direct influence on the Master of Claude de France. He depicted the queen in her prayer book in a very similar fashion.