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Title: Priest Celebrating a Mass (Leaf from the Tarleton Hours)
Artist: Anonymous French (Normandy)
Physical Description: This page of an illuminated manuscript on thin parchment is vertically oriented. Centered in the upper two-thirds of the page is a window-shaped scene of a priest celebrating mass. The priest, with red and white robes and a tonsure, holds up a communion wafer at an altar that has a bible and a communion goblet on it and an image of two figures with halos behind them. The altar and the priest’s robes are trimmed with gold leaf. Behind the priest are two kneeling figures, a man and a woman. They are in the interior of a gothic church, with stone vaulting above them. Below the scene are four lines of calligraphy with the first letter, a ‘D’, highly decorated. Decorative detailing surrounds the text and the scene. The left side consists of an ivy-like plant growing out of the "D", and the bottom and right sides have different foliate-derived design depicted in ink, tempera and gold.
Century: 15th century
Object Creation Date: circa 1430
Accession Number: 1968/2.43
Medium and Support: ink, tempera and gold on thin parchment
relevance: rank 19.13755
Style/Group/Movement: manuscript illumination