Late Gothic coffers; Utilitarian boxes with devotional woodcuts pasted to the insides of their lids remind us that the secular and the sacred were inseparable in the fifteenth century.

Late Gothic imagination was wed to sacred purpose in every particular of daily life. At the close of the Middle Ages, devotion itself was an art, one that lent gravity to all the other arts and shaped the tenor of living. We moderns day-trip to the Gothic world as strangers, carting with us the dry bones of a secular age. Impatient with religious sensibility, we shrink our inheritance from what was once Christendom to objets d'art. The culture that fathered the work remains a foreign country.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Princes and plowmen alike said their pater nosters in time measured not solely by clocks but by liturgical routine: the canonical hours, saint's days, and festivals of the ecclesiastical year. Art's task was to embellish fleeting existence with signs of life's transcendent significance. We could say, with Johan Huizinga, that the Middle Ages knew only applied art.

One poignant starting place for a sympathetic ramble through the centuries is the rare suite of French late Gothic coffrets--small coffers--at the New York branch of C.G. Boerner. A premier dealer in European old master prints, the gallery, in collaboration with Les Enluminures of Paris and Chicago and Kunsthandlung Helmut H. Rumbler of Frankfurt, exhibited eight of them during the 2008 International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) print fair. Wood cases swathed in hand-tooled iron strips and embellished with wrought-iron tracery, they are fitted with complex locks and hidden compartments in the lid. The sides have metal loops for leather straps, and the bottoms are cushioned with leather stuffed with horsehair.

It is the interior, however, that brings them to the attention of print dealers. Pasted to the inside of the lids are fragile hand-colored woodcuts, the earliest form of printed illustration. Made in Paris in the late 1400s, the prints date from the infancy of printing when some books were still being hand-copied. Moveable type put an end to manual copying but color was something else. Hand-coloring, long mistaken by art historians as an antidote to deficient printing technique, was desired from the beginning and esteemed into the seventeenth century.

Each polychromed woodcut would have been recognized by cottagers and clerics alike: God the Father, the Virgin Mary, the Nativity, popular saints, and an intricate Christogram (see Fig. 7). Three (Figs. 4a, 5, 7) are anonymous, as most such prints were in their day; the other five are attributed to an illuminator known as the Master of the tres petites Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, who was possibly Jean d'Ypres. But attribution of incunabula is risky, a sport for specialists and seasoned collectors. More than the arcana of stylistic and technical features, what matters is art's testimony to the fabric of medieval life and its distance from the modern divide between the sacred and the quotidian. In disenchanted times, these relics will be emptied of meaning soon enough. Before they shrivel again into mute collectibles, we can spare a moment for the mentalite of the age that produced them.