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LOS ANGELES, Oct 18 (AFP) - Los Angeles' troubled Getty Museum has unveiled a world premiere exhibition of an illuminated personal prayer book of French King Louis XII that has been reconstructed for the first time in 300 years.
The exhibition, "The Hours of Louis XII," showcases the partial reconstruction of the intricately-handcrafted devotional book illuminated by French artist Jean Bourdichon in 1498, opened on Tuesday.
But the king's book of hours -- lavish devotional manuscripts which were owned by every noble Catholic family in medieval and Renaissance Europe -- had been completely dismembered by the end of the 17th century.
It's magnificently-illustrated pages were dispersed across the world in the intervening centuries.
However, 16 of the miniature paintings and parts of the text were rediscovered in recent decades, allowing Louis XII's "book of hours" to be displayed in the exhibition co-organised by the Getty and London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Researchers and art experts became detectives in their quest to hunt down the pages of Louis XII's book. "There were initially 200 or 300 pages in the book," Getty manuscripts curator Thomas Kren told AFP.
After Louis XII's death in 1515, the book was taken to Britain by the king's widow, Mary Tudor, the daughter of English King Henry VII, and it disappeared from view until the 18th century when parts of it were acquired by the British Museum.
A British Museum curator used the fragments to launch a hunt for the rest of the book in the early 1970s.
Some 16 of its 36 original miniatures were found in auctions and in the estates of deceased collectors, and 15 of them will be on show at the Getty until January 8.
The Getty, run on a hefty trust left by the late US oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, is currently weathering a scandal over allegations it knowingly bought looted art treasures to augment its antiquities collection.
The museum's curator of antiquities, Marion True, resigned last month and is due to go on trial in Italy in November on charges of conspiring to traffic in stolen works. She has denied the charges.
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