, f. 189v-190r The book is large for a book of hours at 30.5 cm by 20 cm, and consists of 476 pages including 49 full-page
miniatures, 12 calendar pages with genre scenes of the months of the year, two pages of Anne's
heraldic devices, and 337 pages with illuminated borders showing flowers and other plants. The full-page miniatures have large figures in an advanced Renaissance style for France at this date, drawing on both Italian and Flemish painting, and with well-developed
perspective. There are gold highlights on the figures, a technique taken from Bourdichon's master
Jean Fouquet, and the miniatures are framed with imitation gilded wood picture frames of the type found in
Early Netherlandish painting, a style Bourdichon used in some other miniatures. Similar frames surround the miniatures of the
Sforza Hours, begun in Italy in the 1490s. Outside the frames the edges of these pages are painted plain black. Some landscape backgrounds suggest a knowledge of the
sfumato style of
Leonardo da Vinci. In particular specific borrowings from the architecture of
Bramante and the painting of
Perugino suggest that Bourdichon may have made an unrecorded visit to Italy. There is a
donor portrait of Anne at prayer, presented by her
patron saints to the dead Christ held by the
Virgin Mary in a
Pietà on the facing page, the Virgin meeting Anne's gaze. Night-scenes include a famous
Annunciation to the Shepherds and the
Nativity. Despite the general "sweetness of Bourdichon's style", the work contains gruesome images of the mass martyrdoms of
Saint Ursula's eleven thousand virgin companions and the
Theban Legion, though rather characteristically both show moments after the action and contain relatively little movement. Scenes from the
Life of Christ and that of the Virgin are depicted as well as a number of portraits and scenes of saints. F. 197v has the rare scene of the Virgin Mary being taught how to read by Saint Anne, who is seated on a dais like a medieval professor. , f. 58v '' The book is also remarkable for its realistic representations of 337 plants in the borders that most text pages are given. There are flowers, cultivated and wild, shrubs, some trees and among the plants a wide variety of insects and small animals of the countryside. The plants include
Cannabis sativa on f. 90v, and the major cereal crops of the day on ff. 94–96. The insects represented are butterflies and moths, dragonflies, grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetles, flies, carpenter bees, crickets, earwigs, bees and beetles. The small animals represented are snakes, lizards,
slow worms, frogs, turtles, squirrels, snails, rabbits, monkeys and spiders. The style borrows from the elaborate and realistic borders of natural life developed in the preceding decades by Flemish illuminators, but unlike them Bourdichon generally treats only one species on a page, and often shows roots and bulbs, and labels each page with the plant's name in Latin and French, in the manner of a
florilegium or a
herbal (a book on medicinal plants). In most pages the border is a single panel to the outside of the text, but in others it surrounds the text on all four sides. The plants are shown as if laid out on a plain coloured surface, upon which they cast a shadow. In 1894
Giulio Camus wrote an account of the plants in the work, and a full modern
facsimile was published in 2008. There are 395 images from the book available online through the BnF. == Commission ==