The Morgan Library & Museum is currently displaying its sixteenth-century original Van Damme Hours to mark the occasion of the manuscript’s facsimile publication by Munich’s Faksimile Verlag. On view through October 6, 2013, the tiny (2.2 x 2.9 inch) Book of Hours is the creation of scribe Antonius van Damme and illuminator Simon Bening.
The Van Damme Hours has a storied provenance, having passed through no less than ten hands before entering the Morgan’s collection in 1924. Although the identity of the man who commissioned the work is unknown, the compelling history of the manuscript’s first known owner, John Strange (1732–1799), is well documented, as is the manuscript’s subsequent owners. Strange, a British dilettante whose eclectic interests included everything from sea sponges to Venetian paintings, supplied the manuscript with its distinctive detachable silver filigree binding. The binding is displayed alongside the manuscript at the Morgan, and replicated as part of the deluxe edition of the facsimile.
The Van Damme Hours (The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.451) is named after its Flemish scribe, Antonius van Damme (active 1495–c. 1545). Although not a documented work, its superb illuminations are the work of Simon Bening (1483/84–1561), the last and greatest Flemish illuminator of the sixteenth century. The manuscript contains all of the stylistic and iconographic elements that comprise the oeuvre of Bening, including the charming illustrated calendar images in which he specialized. Van Damme and Bening had a professional, and surely also a personal, relationship for fifty years.
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