St Margaret and the dragon 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 Margaret opens with the illuminated initial ‘E’ (Erat autem margareta annorum quindecim) painted with white, red, blue and gold ivy-leaf ornament. 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 St Margaret of Antioch and the dragon. According to the Golden Legend, a popular collection of saints’ lives, and indicated in the antiphon below, Margaret was imprisoned by the provost Olybrius at the age of 15 for refusing his advances. While in jail she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon, the episode shown in the main painting. The cross she held upset the monster’s stomach and she was regurgitated whole and unharmed, a corner of her robe caught between the dragon’s fangs. Before she was beheaded Margaret prayed that any women in labour would deliver safely if she invoked the saint, suggestive of her own delivery from the dragon’s belly. In the lower margin Margaret is depicted as a shepherdess with distaff and spindle, having been disowned by her father for converting to Christianity, while the provost on horseback spies upon the young girl. A parrot is added to the upper margin on the verso.