Book of Hours of Francis I
Unknown · 1532-1537
Small enough to close in one hand, this prayer book is bound in solid gold. Enamelled scrolls cover the boards, rubies and turquoises stud the frame, and each cover is set with an intaglio cut in carnelian. On the front, Christ on the cross stands between Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Jerome; on the back, the Virgin and Child enthroned between Saint Barbara and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Enamelled Latin prayers run around them; the one on the back reads: Mother of God, remember me. Inside are one hundred and forty leaves with sixteen full-page miniatures.
Francis the First bought the book from the jeweller Allard Plommyer in January fifteen thirty-eight. It passed to his niece Jeanne d'Albret, to Henri the Fourth and to Marie de Médicis, who kept it for her cabinet in the Louvre in sixteen hundred and four, then to Cardinal Mazarin. In the eighteenth century it crossed to England, to Richard Mead and Horace Walpole, and later to the Rothschilds and the Countess of Carnarvon. The Louvre acquired it in two thousand seventeen, bringing it home to the palace where a queen once kept it.
Did You Know? Marie de Médicis kept this tiny golden book in her cabinet in the Louvre four centuries ago, so its return in 2017 was a homecoming.
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