In somewhat the same way as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the illuminated paintings of The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry exemplify our dream of the Middle Ages at their height, featuring, to quote the new exhibition at the Musée Condé’s press kit, “fairy-tale castles” with dashing lords and elegant ladies at banquets and riding through fields amid the changing seasons. Nor are “the people” excluded: we see a peasant scattering his grain to pigs in the illustration of “November” and a family hovering in a hut surrounded by snow in “February.” There were many beautiful books of hours at the time, but this work is considered the summit of the genre. It was commissioned in 1411 by the Duke of Berry (1340–1416), the third son of France’s King Jean II (known as “the Good” and sometimes “the Magnificent”) and the ruler of the dukedoms of Berry and Auvergne as well as of the county of Poitou. The Duke of Berry chose as artists the Limbourg brothers, Herman, Paul, and Jean, who came from Nimègue (today Nijmegen) in the Duchy of Guelders (in today’s Netherlands). The book was unfinished when the Duke of Berry and the three Limbourgs, all under thirty, died, probably of the plague.
The book’s history was knotty before ending at Chantilly. After the deaths of the patron and the Limbourgs, the book passed into the hands of a Parisian merchant. France’s Charles VII may have acquired the book when he took Paris after years of English and Burgundian rule in 1436. In 1446, Barthélemy d’Eyck, the Flemish painter of King René, picked up working on the book abandoned and neglected since the Limbourgs’ deaths. “September” in the book’s calendar belongs to this period, since it includes the arms of the forty-day tournament celebrated by King René in honor of Charles VII. By 1485, the book belonged to the Dukes of Savoy. Charles I of Savoy commissioned Jean Colombe to embroider the manuscript’s borders. Colombe was responsible for “November.” Philibert II of Savoy left the book to his wife, Marguerite of Austria, who took it with her in 1506 when she became the regent of the Netherlands. The Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola took the book to Genoa. There it remained until 1856, when a Genoese dealer sold it to Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale, the Condé museum’s founder.
The Duke of Aumale installed many treasures in his museum, but none of them is as prized as The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry. Because of its age, its value, and its fragility, it is almost never shown to the public. Scholars’ requests to see it are usually refused. After a recent restoration, it is on display in this exhibition for the first and quite probably the last time.
Books of hours first appeared in the twelfth century. At first they were simple affairs, showing church calendars with feast days and prayers for different hours of the day. They grew more elaborate as artists were employed to turn them into valuable works of art. The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry’s illuminations show both Flemish and Italian influences, such as that of Simone Martini, making it not only a masterpiece of what is now called “International Gothic” but also a forerunner of Renaissance art.
Jean de Berry appears at the beginning in the “January” illustration, at table at a New Year’s banquet, dressed in sumptuous blue dotted with gold fleurs de lys, surrounded by tonsured figures, each one of them carefully depicted. His life was colorful as was his dress. Born at Vincennes Castle, the son of Jean II of France, he loved books and the arts and he collected them throughout his life, putting him into debt and his subjects under heavy taxation. Made Count of Poitou in 1356, he became Duke of Berry and Auvergne four years later. The same year, 1360, he was imprisoned in England in exchange for his father, who had been taken into captivity during the Battle of Poitou, and he remained there for nine years. Moderate in politics and remembering his father’s misstep, he succeeded in persuading his nephew Charles VI, hampered by insanity, and his sons not to fight in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt.
He was the leading collector of his time, accumulating heaps of precious stones, medals, jewels, and manuscripts. In addition, he was also a great builder, creating twenty palaces and castles in Berry, Poitou, and Auvergne and residences in the Parisian region. Jean Froissart, the period’s chronicler, called Berry’s château in Berry, Melun-sur-Vevre, which was devastated in a 1756 tempest, one of the world’s most beautiful houses. A great bibliophile, Berry possessed three hundred books (a very high number for the era), including 127 at his principal seat at Melun. He owned eighteen books of hours, illustrated by the greatest artists of the time and united in this exhibition for the first time since his death. These include the Limbourgs’ Beautiful Hours of the Duke of Berry (1405–09) from New York’s Cloisters and Jacquemart de Hesdin and André Beauneveu’s Very Beautiful Hours of the Duke of Berry (before 1402). Some of the other books he inherited from his brother Charles V, such as The Very Beautiful Hours of Our Lady (begun about 1380 by Jean d’Orléans, supposedly the Master of the Parement of Narbonne, and resumed and completed in 1405–09 by the Master of St. John the Baptist, the Master of the Holy Spirit, and the Limbourgs, who provided three illuminations as late as circa 1412–13).
Other books of hours included in the exhibition come from artists who worked on completing The Very Rich Hours after the Limbourgs’ and their patron’s deaths. Barthelemy d’Eyck and Enguerrand Quarton’s Book of Hours (ca. 1449–50), by the artists working for René d’Anjou, is borrowed from New York, in this case the Morgan Library & Museum. The Cloisters’ Beautiful Hours is of particular interest as a forerunner of Chantilly’s Very Rich Hours and entirely the work of the Limbourgs. The brothers were not only dazzling illustrators but also brilliant artists, able to blend realistic mini portraits, each one of the figures possessing a sharp individual quality, with fantasy in their portrayal of landscape. Gazing at these sublime works under the exhibition’s discreet lighting allows us to imagine the late Middle Ages of our dreams. Those able to visit Chantilly should not miss this chance of a lifetime.
