The decorated halos
Artists' Techniques
The way that halos were decorated throughout the manuscript is remarkably uniform, considering the number of artists at work. The vast majority of them consists of plain gold leaf, usually integrated into the miniature’s background, profiled in vermilion red, with small white dots equally spaced along the entire outline. In a few cases (fols. 23v, 49v, 50r, 73r, 74v), groups of two or three white lines run across the width of the halos.
Hand A was the only artist to occasionally decorate his gilded halos with tooling and incised lines forming various patterns, rather than with painted outlines.
Small miniatures for Psalms 42 and 43
The images are faithful illustrations of the adjacent text. They show David imploring God to protect him from evil men (above, Psalm 42) and thanking God for supporting his ancestors (below, Psalm 43). Both images were painted by the Gaibana Master’s Associate.