Adjoining Leaves from a Book of Hours: Penitential Psalms and King David in Prayer (2 of 3 Excised Leaves)
Noël Bellemare (French, d. 1546)
The 1520s Hours Workshop (French)
c. 1530–35
- Medium
- ink, tempera, and liquid gold on vellum
- Classification
- Manuscript
- Dimensions
- Each leaf: 11.2 x 6.4 cm (4 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Medieval Art
- Credit line
- The Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
These two adjoining leaves begin the penitential psalms, or holy poems recited to ask for forgiveness. An elderly King David is depicted kneeling in prayer after having committed great sins. He has cast his harp and hat to the ground as an expression of humility and looks up to the sky to ask forgiveness. The text of Psalm 6 begins with the large decorated initial D and reads, “Domine ne in furore tuo arguas me: neque in ira tua corripias me,” or “O Lord rebuke me not in thy indignation, nor chastise me in thy wrath.”
