Martyrdom of St Denis 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). The folio was removed from the bound volume between 1933 and 1960. Beneath rubrics in blue, a prayer to St Denis opens with the illuminated initial ‘I’ (Insignes preconis alme tue nobilitati consona) painted with white, red, blue and gold ivy-leaf ornament (most of the gold is lost). It is one of an unusually large series of forty-seven suffrages, or short prayers to saints, arranged hierarchically. The section opens with a number of prefatory prayers, followed by the Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors and Virgins. The miniature is painted in demi-grisaille with pigments and gold and depicts the Martyrdom of St Denis. Patron saint of Paris and France, St Denis was said to have been sent to bring Christianity to the Gauls in the third century, and later was executed in Paris during the Roman persecutions. The saint, wearing his bishop’s mitre and chasuble, kneels at the chopping block while the executioner raises his axe. His companions, Rusticus and Eleutherius who each wear a deacon’s dalmatic, are already decapitated. According to the Golden Legend, a popular collection of saints’ lives, his headless body stood, picked up his head and, guided by an angel, walked to Montmarte (pictured in lower margin). He is perhaps the most famous of the cephalophoric, or ‘head-carrying’, saints. The abbey of Saint-Denis grew around the site of his burial.