Black Hours Online Tales

Recently I've taken an interest in the black manuscripts of the middle ages. I've read two different numbers in my research about how many remain to us; 7 or 9. Either way it is a small enough number that finding good references is challenging. I do most of my reference searching online for expedience and budget reasons. As much as I'd like to spend scads of money on books, it simply isn't feasible. As well, in some ways it is easier to search for something specific directly online.

I've found some bits and pieces of black manuscripts online through digitized collections at various sites and I'm hoping to find more. But those bits and pieces are just that. Small bits in a pool of art that I find damn amazing.

For those unfamiliar with them, black manuscripts, generally Books of Hours, were illuminated manuscripts created in the middle ages. The pages were made of parchment or vellum dyed black and then painted on using period pigments or gold. Even in the few limited examples the artistic styles and techniques vary.

My first contact with black hours was a single image hosted on the Colombia University website for an unfinished black manuscript in the collection of the Hispanic Society of America Museum and Library. What can be seen online of this particular manuscript shows a single image, one left and right page, with the illumination and much of the text done in gold while some of the text is done in white. I have not yet been able to find more of this particular manuscript available to view. You can view that image HERE. (Click the image on that page to view the hi-res version)

I was hooked after seeing that and wanted to see more. Further searches revealed The Black Book of Hours digitized and hosted on the Morgan Museum & Library website. It's the most complete one I've found online yet. You can view it HERE.

I've dabbled with a piece that will have it's own article later based on that book but there were images I kept seeing on Google of another one that I wanted to study; the Black Hours of Galeazzo Maria Sforza. I was finding the same one or two images all over but no other pages. I found an old cached page where digitized images of it was hosted at one time but all the images were gone; there was nothing but little red xs left. The actual manuscript itself is housed at Austrian National Library in Vienna but as far as I can tell the manuscript is not digitized and available online. It's difficult navigating the Digital Reading Room, however, because it's in German and it could be I have just not found it yet. I'll keep looking.

However perseverance did pay off in other areas. Apparently someone else out there hosted 24 images from the Black Hours of Sforza and I was able to find them. Immediately I downloaded them (to avoid losing them all together in case the site they were at was swallowed up by the internet). They weren't particularly good resolution but some is better than none! The images are found on this blog HERE.

This is the one I've been using lately as my reference for a new black piece I'm sketching out and so far I like the look of it the best. I'll include a couple sample images here for others to see. I really love the way the black shows through the colors to provide natural shading and I'm looking forward to trying to duplicate that on my piece.

At one point facsimile copies of this particular manuscript were done but only 200 were printed and are extremely rare. I found images of one of them on a rare book dealer auction site that show much more vibrant colors and I wonder if the vibrancy was created during the copy process or if the digitized images above just fail to capture it adequately. You can see one of the images I captured below.

Either way, I feel fortunate to find what I have and I'm very excited to try my hand at creating blank scrolls for Midrealm based on this manuscript. More updates on the work will come as I progress.