The bishop Morgades' Book of hours

Abstract

In this essay we aim to aproarch the complex reality of the Book of hours (ms. 88) of the Episcopal Museum in Vic that was offered as a apresent to the bishop Morgades between 1891 and 1899. It is a codex that, aiming to be incorporated into the nineteenth-century illustrated books market, was enriched with three series of independent illustrations turning the book into an object in which the visual pleasure outweighs the devotional one. The two first serie of this Book of hours spring from two manuscripts dated around the year 1400. In a previous essay, among the four images comprising this group, we focused our attention in the representation of St. John the Evangelist (f. 33v), a work by the miniaturist and painter from Barcelona Rafael Destorrents. Now, we wish to introduce the three other illustrations to proove his connection with the aesthetic proposals from the Low Countries of the beginning of the XV century. The rest of the manuscript is composed by a serie of folios taken from a codex belonging to the Ghent and Bruges school.