The Coronation of the Virgin, from a Book of Hours

Willem Vrelant · 1460/70

Medium

Manuscript cutting in tempera and liquid gold on parchment

Original size

10.5 × 6.2 cm (4 3/16 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Painted on a single leaf of parchment barely larger than a human hand, this radiant scene of the Virgin's coronation distills the entire devotional world of fifteenth-century Flanders into a few square inches of colour and gold. Willem Vrelant was among the most sought-after illuminators working in Bruges during the city's golden age as a centre of manuscript production. A member of the Guild of St. John and a supplier to the Burgundian court, he brought a distinctive clarity to his figures — faces that are tender rather than stylised, drapery that falls with quiet weight. His technique here combines fine tempera pigments with liquid gold, a subtler approach than raised gilding that allows the gold to breathe within the composition rather than dominating it. Books of Hours were the personal devotional books of the wealthy, and individual leaves were sometimes cut from damaged volumes and collected as independent works of art — which is how this cutting came to the Art Institute of Chicago. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Vrelant's intimate scale into a format made to be lived with, rendering his jewel-like palette and the luminous warmth of the gold with the depth that only brushwork on canvas can achieve.