Franco Cosimo Panini - Visconti Book of Hours

The title Offiziolo Visconti (or Visconti Book of Hours) refers to an exceptionally rich two-volume Book of Hours, whose miniatures were executed at different times by two very different artists. The first, Giovannino de' Grassi, painted the first pages with a few collaborators for Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who died in 1402, causing work to stop, only to be resumed by Belbello da Pavia when Gian Galeazzo's son, Filippo Maria, became duke in 1412. In his final years, Gian Galeazzo had made Pavia and Milan two of the major European centers for the production of illuminated manuscripts, giving rise to a truly unique series of splendid illustrated books dedicated to plants, animals, medicine, and the seasons. While the scribe who drafted the text of the prayer book signed it with his name, Frate Amadeo, the illuminators, as was typical of the time, remain anonymous, and only external evidence tells us that we owe the drawings in the first part of the manuscript to the imagination of Giovannin or de' Grassi. The other great illuminator, who illustrated the second part of the Book of Hours, is Belbello da Pavia. A large part of Belbello's miniatures in the Visconti Book of Hours belong to the early phase of his artistic development, which evolves from a compact style, rich in details and preciousness, to the more relaxed and chromatically bolder language of the Missal of Mantua.

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