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.
Entry into Jerusalem
This image displays Hand A’s salient features: monumental figures, gold-tooled and painted halos, shell gold applied over details painted in green, bright pink robes, tri-chromatic highlights on green drapery, white scumble on blue fabrics and light yellow areas painted with an organic colourant.