Virgin and Child from the Coëtivy Hours

Dunois Master, attributed to

Folio with three-quarter page miniature from a book of hours attributed to the Dunois Master, written in Latin and French in a bastarda script, made in Paris and dated 1443–1445. It was commissioned by Prigent de Coëtivy (1399?–1450) on the occasion of his marriage to Marie de Rais (1429–1457). Removed from the bound volume between 1933 and 1960. A prayer to the Virgin Mary concludes on the recto, illuminated in the margin with Mary reading beside a strawberry plant. Beneath rubrics in red, another prayer to the Virgin Mary opens with the illuminated initial 'D’ (Domina mea sancta maria perpetua virgo virginum) painted with white, red, blue and gold ivy-leaf ornament. It is one of a series of twenty-six prayers to the Virgin Mary in this section of the manuscript. The great many devotions and miniatures dedicated to her is rather unusual. The miniature is painted in demi-grisaille with pigments and gold and depicts the Madonna and Child. They are accompanied by three angels singing from a music sheet. Vases of flowers line the arcade behind them, the red ones allude to Mary’s sweetness. Mary sits on a veranda with the Christ Child in her lap. They each have a hand on a piece of fruit, perhaps a reference to their respective roles as the second Eve and new Adam. A goldfinch rests on the child’s finger, a symbol of his future passion. The bird is associated with the Passion because of its splash of red colouring, its diet of thistle seeds, and the legend that a goldfinch took a thorn from Christ's crown on the road to Calvary. The strawberry plant in the lower margin is also symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice with its red berries, as well as the Trinity with its trifoliate leaves. The thistle, painted in the left margin, is often associated with Mary because it was thought to be the ‘thorns’ among which the lily grows in the Song of Songs. In addition, according to a medieval herbal (Grand Herbier) the cooked leaves increased the flow of breastmilk. The thistle was also connected to the Fall of Man (Genesis 3.17-18), but its thorns were symbolic of the Passion and therefore mankind’s redemption. Mary reading in the lower margin is a sign of her piety.