The Huntington Library Hours of Isabella of Portugal, Simon Bening, and the Confection of a Manuscript for an Iberian Empress in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

When, where, and by whom was Isabella of Portugal’s Huntington Library Hours (HM.1162) written and decorated? The author proposes here that the body of the manuscript, written in Toledo, and 15 small miniatures painted in the 1510s by Simon Bening of Bruges were sent to the southern Netherlands. There associates of the Morgan 491 Master provided the Bening illuminations with decorative enframements and accompanying devotional texts; two new half-page miniatures were also painted. All of that handiwork was then integrated into the manuscript before its dispatch back to Spain shortly before Isabella’s marriage to the emperor Charles V in 1526.