Book of Hours, use of Rome (Heures a lusaige de Romme)

Gilles Hardouyn · c. 1514

Medium

Bound volume of letterpress and metalcuts, with hand-coloring in gouache and gold, on parchment; in a tooled sixteenth-century binding

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Few devotional objects from the early sixteenth century balance the mechanical and the handmade as gracefully as Hardouyn's Book of Hours, where crisp printed metalcuts glow beneath layers of hand-applied gouache and burnished gold. Gilles Hardouyn was a Parisian printer and bookseller working at a pivotal moment — when moveable type had begun to displace manuscript culture but had not yet killed the appetite for luxury. His Books of Hours occupied a clever middle ground: mass-produced in structure yet finished by hand, making illuminated devotional books accessible to a broader clientele without abandoning the richness that made them desirable. The gouache colorwork in this 1514 edition is fine and deliberate, animating the metalcut illustrations with the warmth of a manuscript tradition that was already passing into history. The Art Institute of Chicago's copy retains its original tooled sixteenth-century binding, making it a rare survivor of both the printed sheet and the physical object as Hardouyn's customers would have held it. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the jewel-like intensity of Hardouyn's gouache and gold into oil on canvas, preserving the layered luminosity of the original page while bringing its intricate devotional imagery into lasting focus.