Naissance de saint Jean-Baptiste

In January 1904 the National Library in Turin burned, and 93 leaves of a medieval book of hours went with it, 40 miniatures lost. Two years earlier the French scholar Paul Durrieu had photographed and published them, which is the only reason anyone knows what they looked like. This page belongs to the other half of that same broken-up manuscript, the half that survived. The book was begun for Jean de Berry and divided by his treasurer in 1413, and the parts went their separate ways for five centuries. Turin's civic museum acquired this portion in 1935. The miniatures in it are catalogued under the name Hand G, whom most scholars take to be Jan van Eyck, though others argue for his brother Hubert or for a painter close to them, and the dating runs anywhere from about 1420 to the 1430s. The birth of John fills the scene above, with the baptism of Christ in the strip along the foot of the page.