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.
Christ surrounded by eleven Apostles
This depiction of Christ announcing his pending death to the Apostles is the only full-page miniature painted by the Gaibana Master’s Associate. It shows the artist’s intimate familiarity with his master’s iconographic compositions, as it resembles the miniature for the Common of Saints painted by the Gaibana Master in the Paduan Epistolary.