The Miracle of Saint Guinefort from The Hours of Henry VIII

In 2001, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City held a novel exhibit of the French artist Jean Poyer/Poyet (spellings vary across source materials, but going forward I will use Poyer) that brought together for the first time multiple works including a prayer book for Anne of Bretagne, loaned drawings, paintings, manuscripts from partner institutions, and the Book of Hours of Henry VIII^* – the subject of my next Guinefort Suffrage.

Poyer was a French artist based in Tours who took up the family business and worked in the courts of Kings Louis XI, Charles VIII, and Louis XII until his death in 1503. His work is recognizable as a departure from the more stylized Late Gothic period, instead embracing the figurative splendor of the Renaissance^‡. The Hours of Henry VIII (MS H.8), so named based on rumor from the eighteenth century that the book was once within the infamous king’s collection, is a prime example of Poyer’s artistic prowess and holds its own as one of the finest Books of Hours in existence today^§.

This book of hours contains a suffrage section that includes beautifully rendered scenes from the lives and deaths of the subject saints atop paired grisaille images depicting various miracles, martyrdoms, or anecdotes of their lives. The suffrage prayer begins within the illustrated folio and is usually completed on the next page (Figure 4).

The whole work is worth a look, and conveniently is available through the library as a high-quality scan. There is also a publication that coincided with the 2001 show – The Hours of Henry VIII: A Renaissance Masterpiece by Jean Poyet by Roger S. Wieck, who featured in my previous blog post about The Hours of Catherine of Cleves and is the Melvin R. Seiden Curator and Department Head of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum. This book was available online through the Internet Archive, but the majority of the site is currently down due to a recent cyber attack. It’s definitely been added to my “need to read” list .

This brings me to the page I created, and this piece featured two new approaches – using a matte base coat to seal between layers and the application of shell gold. For the first – as I am using water based gouache I ran into problems when trying to replicate Poyer’s delicate, layered style of painting figures. Take for instance the subtle stippling in his depiction of the Holy Family (Figure 7) or the layered pigment on the ground tiles in the depiction of David and Uriah (Figure 8).

As a solution, I found that by applying a quick layer of Super Base from Culture Hustle I was able to layer more watercolor gouache on top of a dry layer without reactivating the previous layers. This ended up working really well for recreating the style of the original work.

Next up – shell gold. This was my first time using the material, and I ended up creating my own batch based on this youtube video tutorial^¶. It took me probably an hour of tapping the gold and mixing/blending/washing the material but the end result worked perfectly and was much cheaper than commercially available materials. Shell gold requires much more raw material to execute with than gold leaf, so it was a costlier version of gilding that was used in the finest works for the wealthiest patrons^#. It also allows for the highlights seen in the grisaille scenes, which would not be possible with just gold leaf. 

Overall, this was a challenging exercise for a page in a very different style for me. For my page I framed the narrative around two themes: the main tale of the life of Saint Guinefort and a grisaille depiction of his pilgrimage site. This is reflected in the upper image showing the faithful dog killing the serpent with an upturned crib in the background and the infant – mouth opened as he cries – laying3 in the foreground, and a scene of a vetula and mother praying and performing the changeling rite at the well of Saint Guinefort (as described by Stephen of Bourbon).

The rendering of the figures reflects Poyer’s Renaissance influence in the work, where the scenes have a higher level of action and dynamism as opposed to the more stiff depictions in earlier illuminated works. The color palette was matched to the materials used, though I am still using gouache in these early pieces as opposed to exact pigments, which I am now starting to explore.

Finally, the model for this Guinefort is Boy with a Greyhound by Paolo Veronese – a sixteenth century portrait of an unknown young Italian aristocrat and his beloved dog, standing faithfully by his side.