The Count of Meliacin by Girardin d'Amiens
c. 1270
Illumination on parchment
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

Master Honore

(b ?Amiens; fl c. 1288–1300). French illuminator. He was first associated with a specific manuscript by Delisle (1902), who argued that a record of the payments for a Breviary made for Philip IV, King of France, could be matched to an extant Breviary from the turn of the 13th century (Paris, Bib. N., MS. lat. 1023). The royal accounts for 1296 show an order for the payment of 107 livres parisis 10 sous on 25 August to an intermediary, Galterus, canon of the Sainte-Chapelle. Delisle linked this record to another royal payment of 20 livres made later in 1296 (but before All Saints’ Day), to ‘Honoratus illuminator’ for the decoration of unspecified books for the King, thus identifying Honore with the Breviary in Paris. The internal evidence of the manuscript supports the theory of a royal origin: the calendar and offices are for the use of the Sainte-Chapelle; the manuscript was produced with exemplary care; a king kneels before a statue of the Virgin on the Beatus page (fol. 8r); and there are fleurs-de-lis in the background of the frontispiece (fol. 7v; see fig.). In addition, in the 1380 inventory of Charles V, the manuscript is listed with a binding bearing the arms of France. The date of the manuscript also appears consistent with the documents since the Office of St Louis (can 1297) is an added section, indicating that the rest of the manuscript must have been made before 1297. Martin (1906) associated the Honore of the 1296 account with an illuminated copy of Gratian’s Decretals (Tours, Bib. Mun., MS. 558) that bears a note (fol. 351r) stating that it was purchased in 1288 for 40 livres from the illuminator Honore, Rue Erembourc de Brie (now Rue Boutebrie) in Paris. Martin, quoting the Parisian tax roll of 1292, noted that Honoré, his son-in-law and associate RICHARD OF VERDUN, and his assistant Thomassin were assessed at a total of 20 sous, which was more than any other workshop. On this basis he concluded that Honore was ‘probably the most able and certainly the most productive of all late thirteenth-century illuminators’. The painter’s pre-eminence was endorsed by Vitzthum and was given renewed strength by Martin (1923) and the publications of Cockerell and Millar (1953), the latter of whom attributed to this illuminator a Somme le roi (London, BL, Add. MS. 54180; two detached folios Cambridge, Fitzwilliam, MSS 192 and 368) on the basis of the Decretals and the Breviary.

La Somme le Roy
c. 1290
Illumination on parchment
British Museum, London

Book of Hours
c. 1290
Illumination on parchment
Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg

Cantigas de Alfonso el Sabio
1250-1300
Illumination on parchment
Biblioteca del Escorial, Madrid