Anonymous - Illuminated Prayers Book - 1799

[ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT – FOLK ART CALLIGRAPHY – PRAYERS BOOK – HAND-PAINTED FLOWERS]

A charming hand-written and hand-painted prayer book, dated 1799 – entirely manuscript, in a blind-stamped leather binding with the Lamb of God

Illuminated manuscript with hand-painted flower pieces

„Nützliches Hand-Büchlein worinen zu finden schöne geistreiche Andachts-Übungen, Nebst einem Lobgesang zu der göttlichen Vorsichtigkeit. Nebst schönen Morgen- und Abendliedern, wie auch Vereinigung mit dem Willen Gottes, nützlicher Weise die H. Mess anzuhören, zu beichten und zu kommunizieren. Von einer frommen Seele zur Liebe des Nächsten in der Kürze aus andern Büchern ausgezogen 1799."

Manuscript on paper, German, dated 1799
Contemporary brown leather over boards, blind-tooled

This is not a printed book but a manuscript throughout – written, ruled and decorated entirely by hand at the very end of the eighteenth century. As the title page explains with touching modesty, it was compiled "by a pious soul, for love of one's neighbour, drawn in brief from other books": a private anthology of the prayers its maker found most valuable, copied out and bound to be used every day.

The calligraphy is the work of a practised hand. Headings are drawn in an ornamental black Fraktur of real flourish, subheadings and rubrics picked out in red, and every single page is framed within a ruled red border – the discipline of a scribe trained in the old tradition, carried out page after page for a hundred leaves and more. The contents follow the rhythm of a Catholic devotional day and year: the Morgen-Andacht with the morning hymn "Ermunter dich mein Geist", evening devotions, the Mess-Gebetter for hearing Mass from the entrance into church to the elevation and communion, prayers before confession, and a hymn of praise to Divine Providence.

What gives the book its real charm are the hand-painted flower pieces in body colour – tulips, pansies and rosettes springing from fans of green leaves – set at the head of the first devotion and used again and again to fill the foot of a page where the text runs out. The title page is enclosed in a complete painted border of flowering tendrils. These are not academic paintings but genuine folk art, the same vocabulary of tulips and hearts found on painted furniture, marriage chests and birth certificates of the German-speaking lands, and their naive directness is exactly what collectors of popular religious art look for.

The binding matches the contents: brown leather over boards, blind-tooled with a wide floral roll border and, stamped at the centre of both covers, the Agnus Dei – the Lamb of God bearing the banner of the Resurrection – which identifies the book at once as Catholic and probably as the work of a South German or Austrian binder.

Manuscripts of this kind were made in modest numbers for personal use, were used hard, and survive far less often than printed prayer books of the same date. One in its original binding, complete and with its painted decoration intact, is a genuinely uncommon survival.

Condition: Contemporary blind-tooled leather over boards; the leather rubbed, scuffed and stained, with wear and small losses at the corners and along the edges, and the spine cracked with loss of leather at head and foot. The text block firm. Internally very well preserved: the paper clean and fresh, the ink strong, the colours bright, with only light age-toning and occasional small spots. (Please see the photographs.)


Pages: 122 p. (no missing pages)

Disclaimer: this ad was created with the help of AI.