( fl c. 1520–50). Workshop of French manuscript illuminators. Four individual hands can be distinguished within this group, which began its activity in the French Renaissance, probably in the area of Tours: the Rosenwald Master; the Master of Jean de Mauléon; the Master of the Getty Epistles; and the Doheny Master. Their distinctive style emerged from the Loire Valley tradition of fine manuscripts to which they added complex borrowings from the Antwerp Mannerists, Albrecht Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi. Some 25 religious and secular manuscripts are known, dating from the early 1520s to the mid-1530s, with others from the middle of the century. These are mainly Books of Hours, the calendar illumination, main miniatures, saints’ vignettes and decorative motifs (both traditional and classicizing) of which show a continuing stylistic tradition. The Masters were also commissioned to provide frontispieces for the vernacular archival compilations and translated humanist texts produced c. 1522–35 for the court of Francis I by court secretaries from Tours. The 1520s Hours Workshop has long been associated with Geofroy Tory, the Bourges-born Parisian humanist, publisher and printer. A fresh look at the manuscripts and Tory’s publications reveals that he used the talents of the workshop rather than working among them as artist and scribe.

Part of the Masters, anonymous, and monogrammists family