The Murder of Thomas Becket, page two, from a Book of Hours

Nicolas Brouwer · 1430/40

Medium

Manuscript cutting with tempera and gold leaf, and pen and black ink, and with Latin inscriptions in light brown and red inks, ruled in light brown ink, on parchment

Original size

23.7 × 15.6 cm (9 3/8 × 6 3/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This small but arresting page from a Book of Hours depicts one of the most dramatic martyrdoms in medieval Christianity — knights in armour cutting down an archbishop at the altar — rendered with the jewel-like precision of early Flemish illumination. Nicolas Brouwer worked within the Flemish manuscript tradition of the 1430s, a moment when illuminators were beginning to absorb the spatial depth and naturalistic detail emerging in panel painting. His use of raised gold leaf alongside finely layered tempera gives the scene an almost luminous quality, the figures caught in a frozen violence that feels both devotional and genuinely unsettling. The Latin inscriptions running through the composition root the image in liturgical use, reminding us this was a page meant to be held in the hands and prayed over. Thomas Becket's murder on 29 December 1170 became one of the most frequently illustrated events in medieval devotional manuscripts, with Canterbury quickly established as a major pilgrimage site and Becket canonised within three years of his death. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the delicate intensity of the original — its layered pigments, the sense of arrested movement — onto canvas in a format made to live on a wall rather than be turned in trembling hands, but carrying the same careful attention to every figure and fold.