In the family lounge of Lodge la Belle Montagne, the Music Box Book of Hours lay open to the painting of a Castle high above a river. "It was Nico who identified this Castle as the Royal Chateau of Amboise, located on a bluff in the Loire River Valley," Sido said. "This Castle is what led us to the studio of Jean Bourdichon, Court Painter in the reign of Anne of Brittany, whether when she was married to Charles VIII from 1491-to 1498 or when she was married to his successor, Louis XII, from 1498 until her death in 1514. We", Sido explained, included artists books scholar, Caydance O'Brien McGuire, whom she had hired as a consultant, as well as the University Archivist in whose domain the Book of Hours was secreted due to the persistent threat of manuscript thieves..

"Bourdichon's atelier," Sido continued, "was probably actually in the Chateau de Plessis-lez-Tours, about 17 miles along the Loire River from Amboise. Then, studying the paintings in this Book of Hours we postulated that the artist was not Bourdichon himself. Our thesis is that he was a sailor/adventurer from a noble Breton family, who -- beginning in late Spring in order to fish for Cod -- sailed to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. It was not unusual to bring artists aboard to make maps and document the landscape. In the Winter, the Master of the Music Box Book of Hours worked as an illuminator in Jean Bourdichon's studio, where into gridded spaces created by a scribe, he outlined the designs he had sketched, and -- before they were painted -- inlayed the gold."