A STUDY OF THE TRANSITION FROM HAND-PRODUCED TO PRINTED IMAGES IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: A MIDDLE DUTCH PRAYER BOOK ON THE LIFE AND PASSION OF CHRIST (KORTRIJK, S.B. MS. 26)

Abstract

This dissertation explores imagery and text in a vernacular prayer book made in West Flanders in the early 1480s, now preserved at the Public Library in Kortrijk, Belgium (Stedelijke Openbare Bibliotheek, G.V., Cod. 26). The striking combination of woodcuts, drawings and manual coloring in the modest manuscript is a prime example of hybrid

image-making techniques used during the transition from manuscript illumination to printed illustration in the second half of the fifteenth century. The study comparatively examines the Kortrijk prayer book in relation to two contemporary Middle Dutch manuscripts containing closely related prayer cycles, one of them illustrated only with

hand-painted miniatures by the so-called Masters of the Dark Eyes (Cologne, Collection Renate König, currently on deposit at the Kolumba Art Museum, Cologne), and the other with hand-colored copper engravings by the Master of the Berlin Passion (Sint Truiden,

Minderbroederenbibliotheek, Instituut voor Franciscaanse Geschiedenis, Ms. A32). Analysis of the text identifies Thomas à Kempis's "Orationes et Meditationes de Vita Christi" as a primary source of the three related prayer cycles. The dissertation also explores the adaptation of and variation on text sources in the prayers. The narrative woodcuts used

in the Kortrijk manuscript are situated in a stemma of print cycles designed as book illustrations, presumably going back to a lost cycle of engravings by the Master of the Berlin Passion from the early 1450s. The broad dissemination and remarkable continuity of that pictorial series raise interesting questions about the potency of the newly introduced

printmaking techniques. A series of case studies discussed in relation to the hybrid images in the Kortrijk manuscript call attention to a little studied category of printed images that were altered and completed by hand.