Hand-Coloured Missal
[MISSAL.]
Ordinaire de la Messe. [Paris?, c. 1890–1900].
Tall 12mo (185 x 90 mm), pp. XLVI; without title-page?, lithographed throughout, most pages initialled at foot ‘LR’, hand-colouring up to p. XXXIX; slight browning to a few pages; in contemporary drab wrappers; spine perished, sewing coming loose; faint circular ink stamp and faint pencil inscription (Marguerite Veraud?) to upper cover.
A lithographed and elegantly hand-coloured French Missal in the style of a medieval manuscript.
The text – comprising prayers, readings, and rubrics for the celebration of Mass – is enhanced with elegant floral and foliate borders, inhabited, for example, by a flaming salamander, a griffin, and dragon-like grotesques. Butterflies, a dove, a kingfisher, and a spider’s web also feature. The initials, borders, and line fillers are hand coloured up to p. XXXIX in vibrant shades of blue, brown, green, pink, and yellow.
The salamander was a mythical lizard-like monster that was supposed to be able to live in fire and to quench it with the chill of its body; Pliny refers to this belief in his Natural History. The fabled griffin was the offspring of the lion and the eagle; it was ‘sacred to the sun and kept guard over hidden treasures’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).
We have been unable to identify the ‘LR’ whose initials appear at the foot of most pages or to trace another copy.