The Cross-eyed Queen.(The Talk of the Town)(Queen Claude's prayer book)

In May, a tiny, exquisite volume went on display at the Morgan Library & Museum: a prayer book made for Queen Claude of France, who was born in the penultimate year of the fifteenth century. Claude, a near-contemporary of Anne Boleyn, who served her at the French court as a prepubescent lady-in-waiting, was betrothed at the age of six to her cousin Francois, the Duke of Angouleme and heir-presumptive to the French throne. She was wed at fourteen. She went on to bear seven royal children, including a son who became Henry II of France, and she died at twenty-four.

"The French say that she was epuisee--exhausted," Roger S. Wieck, a curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan, explained the other day. Wieck has been studying Queen Claude's prayer book ever since the museum received it, as a gift, a few months ago, from Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg, whose late husband was an art dealer and collector of illuminated manuscripts. (Inside, on the front flyleaf of the prayer book, is one of Mr. Rosenberg's bookplates, which were designed for him by Picasso.) The book, which is bound in red velvet and has two golden clasps, is smaller than a credit card, and includes fifty-two folios, painted front and back with a hundred and thirty-two miniature illuminations drawn from the Bible and the lives of the saints.

The name of the artist, of whose works only about a dozen survive, is lost to history, but scholars speak of the Claude Master, because of the quality of this, his greatest work. His palette tends toward soft roses and mauves--in an image of the Virgin's coronation, Christ and his mother wear matching amethyst-colored gowns, trimmed in gold--and the brushwork is stippled, as if it were the effort of a mouse-size Seurat. "It's an amazing creation," Wieck said. "And, of course, Claude's eyes were very young."

It is not known who commissioned the prayer book, but, Wieck explained as he stood in Mr. Morgan's library, where the book is being displayed in a Plexiglas case usually reserved for a Gutenberg Bible, he is beginning to think it was the Queen herself, to ...