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.
Flight into Egypt
This miniature exemplifies Hand A’s sophisticated painting of drapery. The Virgin’s green cloak is shaded in green lines darker than the base green tone, but the highlights combine the traditional white patterns with areas modelled in pink and harmonising with the pink tunic beneath. This tri-chromatic modelling is among Hand A’s hallmarks.