Manuscripts Image Puzzles - 05/28-29

About today's image

The first "weekend edition" of Medieval Image Puzzles returns to the wonderful collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and, particularly, to another Book of Hours once owned by Jean, the Duke of Berry: NAL 3093 (the "Très belles Heures de Notre Dame"), f. 169r.

This book has a rather complicated history, having been started in the late fourteenth century (1380s?), and, after undergoing several traumatic splits in the fifteenth century and fire damage in the twentieth, now exists in various pieces owned by the BNF, the Louvre, the Getty, and the Civic Museum in Turin. This would be a lovely candidate for virtual reconstruction, where the histories of the different portions of the book could be explored in detail. You can view the digital images and information about the portion of this manuscript owned by the BNF here. There is also a lovely wiki article that provides more information about the complicated wanderings of this book.

This post was inspired by Michael Appleby's IIIF-powered puzzles and uses code from Brad Manderscheid's HTML5 tutorial. All images used for these puzzles are delivered via IIIF