‘Libro d’ore Kraus’
Book of Hours (use of Rome) with abbreviated Psalter
- Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis
Manuscript in Latin on vellum
Italy, Milan, c. 1480
93 x 70 mm
Price on request.
247 leaves. 12 large illuminated initials on a field of gold with marginal extensions, 2 historiated initials, 14 miniatures. 18th century brown morocco binding.
This exquisite minute Book of Hours displays the delicacy of the best Milanese illumination in the later fifteenth century.
This work may be attributed to Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, the celebrated painter, illuminator, and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci. Its fourteen miniatures reveal an artist of exceptional talent: poised figures, tender expressions, minute golden highlights, and a luminous palette of blues, rose, green, violet, and burnished gold that gives the pages an almost enamelled brilliance, especially in the Annunciation border, where dark grounds, gold filigree, floral ornament, and blue monochrome medallions evoke Lombard enamels and goldsmith work.
When the manuscript was sold by H. P. Kraus, William Suida identified it with the documented Book of Hours made for Francesco Borromeo, for which Ambrogio de Predis was paid in Milan in 1474; recent scholarship, however, has made this identification less secure, and the documented 1474 Borromeo book has now been plausibly identified with Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 591, the Book of Hours of Giberto Borromeo.
