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.
Nativity
Hand B employed traditional Byzantine iconography, showing the Nativity in a landscape setting and including the shepherds as well as the new-born Christ Child about to receive his first bath. He also emulated the Gaibana Master’s broccoli-like trees. However, the emphatically linear, graphic style is characteristic of contemporary German painting and illumination.