Book of Hours, Use of Paris

Simon Vostre · 1508

Medium

Woodcut and letterpress in black with brush and gouache, and pen and ink on vellum (discolored at edges), in eighteenth-century full red goatskin, sewn on raised bands, with Cambridge-style gold tooling, rolled edges in gold, gold stamped spine decoration, hand-sewn silk headbands, and marbled endsheets

Original size

22.6 × 30 cm (8 15/16 × 11 13/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Few objects illuminate the threshold between manuscript culture and the printed book quite like Simon Vostre's 1508 Book of Hours — a work where the precision of the press meets the intimacy of the human hand. Vostre was among the most prolific publishers of printed Books of Hours in early sixteenth-century Paris, producing editions that competed directly with hand-illuminated manuscripts by combining woodcut illustration with meticulous hand-finishing in gouache and ink on vellum. This page demonstrates that hybrid ambition: the black letterpress and woodcut forms provide the structure, while the applied colour and fine pen work give it the warmth of something made for a single reader. The result is neither purely printed nor purely illuminated — it occupies a category of its own. Books of Hours were the bestselling books of the medieval and early modern world, and Vostre's editions were so widely circulated that his distinctive border designs became shorthand for Parisian devotional printing across Europe. The Art Institute of Chicago's example is further distinguished by its eighteenth-century binding — full red goatskin with Cambridge-style gold tooling and hand-sewn silk headbands — making the volume itself a layered artifact of craft across centuries. Our hand-painted oil reproduction honours that layered quality, translating both the graphic boldness of the woodcut lines and the delicate colour passages into a format built to endure.