page_title: Turin-Milan Hours
section_title: The style and identity of Hand G
hierarchical_section_title: Turin-Milan Hours / The style and identity of Hand G
caption_attribution_description: Baptism in the river Jordan.
context_page_description: The Turin-Milan Hours is a partially destroyed illuminated manuscript, which despite its name is not strictly a book of hours. It is of exceptional quality and importance, with a very complicated history both during and after its production. It contains several miniatures of about 1420 attributed to an artist known as "Hand G" who was probably either Jan van Eyck, his brother Hubert van Eyck, or an artist very closely associated with them. About a decade or so later Barthélemy d'Eyck may have worked on some miniatures. Of the several portions of the book, that kept in Turin was destroyed in a fire in 1904, though black-and-white photographs exist.
  Work on the manuscript began around 1380 or 1390, and over the course of almost sixty years involved a variety of artists, assistants and patrons during perhaps seven separate campaigns of work. Its conception and first leaves were commissioned by a high-ranking member of the French court whose identity is now lost, and involved mainly French artists. Before 1413 it was in the possession of Jean, Duc de Berry; by 1420 in that of John of Bavaria, Count of Holland, who contracted mostly Flemish artists.
context_section_description: Hand G, who may or may not have been Jan van Eyck, paralleled the achievement and innovation of that artist's panel paintings in the miniature form, firstly in the technical development of the tempera medium and use of glazes to achieve unprecedented detail and subtlety, and also in his illusionist realism, especially seen in interiors and landscapes – the John the Baptist page shows both well. Many of the background portions of the attributed leaves seem concerned with the depiction of receding space, and it is often thought that in this aspect that the work of Hand G is most innovative. However, from the earlier pages he seems to be grappling with the techniques for the first time. He was successful early on in showing space receding over reflective water or within interior spaces, but appears to have experienced more difficulty with landscape. Early attempts, for example Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane in which three imposing figures in the foreground are presented before a distant hillscape, see him, perhaps crudely, eliminating the mid-ground to create the illusion of distance. Yet the underdrawing show him already experimenting with more effective and innovative techniques he was later to master, such as lowering the line of the horizon, and using radiating verticals to increase the sense of depth.
  Only three pages at most attributed to Hand G now survive, those with large miniatures of the Birth of John the Baptist, the Finding of the True Cross – not accepted by all – (both shown above), and the Office of the Dead (or Requiem Mass), with the bas-de-page miniatures and initials of the first and last of these.  Four more were lost in 1904: all the elements of the pages with the miniatures called The Prayer on the Shore (or Duke William of Bavaria at the Seashore,  the Sovereign's prayer etc.), and the night-scene of the Betrayal of Christ (which was already described by Durrieu as "worn" before the fire), the Coronation of the Virgin and its bas-de-page, and the large picture only of the seascape Voyage of St Julian & St Martha.  Examination under infra-red light has shown underdrawing for a different composition in the Birth of John the Baptist, who was the patron saint of John, Count of Holland. The unique and enigmatic seashore subject seems to illustrate an episode from the ferocious internal politics of the family, who can be clearly identified by the arms on a banner.  Châtelet suggests the Peace of Woodrichem in 1419, when John succeeded in wresting control of her inheritance from his unlucky niece Jacqueline, Countess of Hainaut.  The bas-de-page shows another landscape, of flat Dutch countryside, looking forward to the Dutch Golden Age painting of the 17th century.
  Châtelet contrasts the Turin miniatures with those of the Limbourg brothers, which show faces in profile, with the clothes barely modeled onto the bodies, and the figures not integrated into the space of the miniature.  In the Hand G images the figures are fully modelled, as are their clothes, shown from a variety of angles, and are rather small, not dominating the space of their setting. Chiaroscuro modelling gives depth and realism to both figures and setting. For Friedlaender "The local colours are adjusted to the dominant tone with inexplicable confidence. The gliding of shadows, the rippling of waves, the reflection in the water, cloud formations: all that is most evanescent and most delicate is expressed with easy mastery.  A realism that the entire century failed to reach seems to have been achieved once by the impetus of the first attack".
  Kenneth Clark, who thought Hand G to be Hubert, agreed: "Hubert van Eyck has, at one bound, covered a space in the history of art which the prudent historian would have expected to last over several centuries",  and singled out praise for the innovations in the subtle depictions of landscape. Of the seashore scene he says: "The figures in the foreground are in the chivalric style of the de Limbourgs; but the sea shore beyond them is completely outside the fifteenth-century range of responsiveness, a
caption: Bas-de-page of the Baptism of Christ, Hand G, Turin. Milan Filio 93v, Inv 47.
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