Three newly identified leaves in the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, expand the dispersed Gradual of Cristoforo Cortese, painted in Venice around 1420. Their discovery shows that the commission was conceived in multiple volumes, with the Sanctoral ruled for seven staves and the Temporal for eight. Over two centuries of dispersal have scattered its leaves from London and Cambridge to Bologna, Paris, Philadelphia, and now Prague, and these findings bring us closer to reconstructing the scale of Cortese’s lost masterpiece

During a recent visit to Words on the Wave in Dublin, I encountered some of the most moving early Irish manuscripts I’ve ever seen, including treasures from St. Gallen that hadn’t been back to Ireland in over a thousand years.

Two newly digitized illuminated leaves from the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt depicting Saints Lawrence and Lucia have now been firmly linked to the celebrated 15th-century Antiphonal illuminated by Baldassare Coldiradi. Their identification expands our understanding of this Cremonese masterpiece and affirms the continued role of digital access in manuscript scholarship.

To stand before the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is to witness the height of medieval artistic ambition—an object that is not only breathtaking in its execution but monumental in its cultural significance. Currently on view at the Château de Chantilly, this manuscript—arguably the most famous illuminated book in the world—is displayed in full for the first time in a generation. The exhibition brings together not only the complete calendar cycle by the Limbourg brothers but also reunites the treasures of the Duc’s extraordinary library, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to encounter the intellectual, artistic, and devotional legacy of one of the great patrons of the Middle Ages.

Explore the reconstruction of an early 14th-century Bolognese illuminated Antiphonal by Nerio. Dispersed leaves in major collections reveal a rare glimpse into medieval manuscript artistry—and the visual, stylistic, and iconographic links that connect them.

This post explores a remarkable illuminated leaf of Jacob’s Dream from a 15th-century Swabian Missal and the rediscovery of its sister leaves now in Cambridge, Tokyo, and Philadelphia. Through heraldic clues and auction records, we begin to reconstruct a once-complete manuscript linked to the von Magenbuch family and the artistic legacy of late medieval Augsburg.