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.
Betrayal
The artist responsible for this miniature, Hand F, usually outlined the limbs of his figures in grey. This miniature is an exception. Here, the artist adhered to the red outlines employed by most other artists throughout the volume. He also painted a hem in shell gold, perhaps to mirror the hems executed by Hand A on the facing page.