The Fifth Hour of the Day seems almost to be gently lowering the sinking sun with her right hand. It is not dusk yet; her sister the Sixth Hour of the Day, with her little bat, represents the time of last light. For some reason, Sarah Hutchins Killikelly saw this as the nymph pointing to the rising moon. But the moon is not conventionally shown as being radiant in this way. Surely this Hour is the counterpart of the Second Hour of the Day, who assists the sun in its ascent. In her left hand she holds a small bunch of a plant of some sort. Killikelly says, in a subtly moralizing way, that this is grain, the fruit of her labors. Another, more plausible reading is that she is holding medicinal plants. No doubt when the Hours first debuted the nature of this vegetation was well known & readily recognized, but it is now lost to us.
Printers of color reproductions gave her rosy robes reflective of the colors of the sunset, or cooler blue robes, suggestive of the growing shadows.
Only the Third Hour of the Night is less represented in surviving cameos and we have yet to see a really well executed and complete rendering of the Fifth Hour of the Day.
