Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th – 18th Centuries

The History Museum of Mobile is excited to announce the next major exhibition, Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th – 18th Centuries, opening January 10, 2025. This engaging exhibition includes more than thirty-five works-some with elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament- from medieval Bibles, Prayer Books, Psalters, Books of Hours, Choir Books, Missals, Breviaries, and Lectionaries drawn from the collection of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, who organized the exhibition. Examples of the materials-parchment, vellum, gold leaf, and minerals which were ground into pigments-used by artists before the age of printed books to create these extraordinary pages are also featured in the exhibit.

Highlights include a lavish Bifolio from a Book of Hours with illuminations by Joachinus de Gigantibus de Rotenberg (German, active 1440s – 1490s), a Perugian Leaf from a Dominican Missal from the late fourteenth century, a large Bifolio of a Spanish Choir Book from the fifteenth century, a Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther from the eighteenth century, and a leather-bound Italian Gradual containing the chants for the mass penned in the 1720s.

Most of the works date from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries and are created with ink on parchment or vellum (animal skin). French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, and German examples will be included in the exhibition. Additionally, non-Western sheets, including a sumptuous seventeenth-century leaf from the Koran and Shahnameh (the illustrated Persian Book of Kings) pages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all of the sheets came to the Reading Public Museum through Otto Ege, a well-known Cleveland-area bookseller and specialist who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Admission:
Adults - $14.00
Seniors (65+) - $12.00
Active/Retired Military (w/ ID) - $12.00
Students (18+ w/ID) - $12.00
Children (13-18) - $10.50
Children (6-12) - $8.00
Children (5 and under) – FREE
Members - FREE

Free on the first Sunday of each month.