The decorated halos
Artists' Techniques
The way that halos were decorated throughout the manuscript is remarkably uniform, considering the number of artists at work. The vast majority of them consists of plain gold leaf, usually integrated into the miniature’s background, profiled in vermilion red, with small white dots equally spaced along the entire outline. In a few cases (fols. 23v, 49v, 50r, 73r, 74v), groups of two or three white lines run across the width of the halos.
Hand A was the only artist to occasionally decorate his gilded halos with tooling and incised lines forming various patterns, rather than with painted outlines.
The Three Women and the Angel at the Tomb
This, one of Hand A’s most impressive compositions, displays his salient features, including the elaborately painted drapery and the gold-tooled halos. It also shows his familiarity with iconographic compositions by the Gaibana Master, as it resembles the painting of the same subject in the Paduan Epistolary.