LOOKING AT THE PICTURES IN THE PEWS

“In its dissected form, the Belles Heures is an immersive look at life, death and devotion in 15th-century France. Its seven picture-book insertions distinguish it from other books of hours and amount to a remarkable cache of well-preserved medieval painting. They look back to Giotto’s 13th-century frescoes and ahead to the Northern Renaissance.”

The “Belles Heures” , a prayer book commissioned in the early years of the fifteenth century, is now receiving its due as a radiant masterpiece of the late Middle Ages.Think of it as religion in the form of the graphic novel.  If art can be said to reveal the spirit of an age, then the decorated pages of the “Belles Heures” of the Duc du Berry are proof only that the fifteenth century in France was a period of extraordinary contrasts. Certainly, the sparkling minatures of saints and angels seem to have little or nothing to do with the mundane horrors that people faced.

" Ultimately the brothers painted a full 172 miniatures for this manuscript. Ordinarily, a rather luxurious book of hours would be considered quite opulent with just twenty or so miniatures. Sometime in the spring of 1409, the Duke was able to hold his newly completed treasure for the first time. Les Belles Heures demonstrated the extent to which the Limbourg brothers' talents had developed since their first commission, the Bible Moralisée for Philip the Bold. Their drawing was more confident, their compositions more balanced, though their distinctive style remained."

By all accounts, the dawn of the fifteenth century was a time of chronic war, injustice, misery, and pestilence.¨Poets like Eustache Deschamps wrote melancholy lyrics of a world in decline:  ” Time of mourning and temptation,/ Age of tears, of envy and torment,/ Time of languor and damnation,/ A declining age near its end,/ Time full of horror…

Even the church was in trouble. It was rumored that not one soul had entered paradise since the Great Schism began. Outbreaks of the plague were common, taxes were high, and political stability…whats that? In such a world, a beautiful Book of Hours provided welcome escape, at least for the few who could afford one.

"Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which occurred less than a week before he died, is depicted in this illumination from Jean de Berry's Book of Hours (Les très belles heures de Notre-Dame). The illumination on parchment, c. 1409, is now owned by a museum (the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Madama) in Turin, Italy."

The “Belles Heures” is the first of two Books of Hours with miniatures by the Limbourg brothers, artists in the service of the Duc de Berry. The later work: the “Tres Belles Heures” in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, has been widely reproduced, but it took longer for The “Belles Heures” to attain the same recognition. The prince commissioned the “Belles Heures”  some time around 1405, toward the end of a long life as the powerful ruler of the duchy of Berry in central France. Son of the Valois king John II, the Duc de Berry and his brothers; King Charles V, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and Louis of Anjou; were the great collectors and art patrons of their time.

"Prayer for Travelers The Duke on a Journey, Folio 223v Jean de Berry is dressed in red and rides a white horse at the right edge of the composition, surrounded by his retinue. The prayer for travelers was unprecedented in a book of hours, and after this, the duke had it included in two other manuscripts. His life was in danger due to conflict between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, and although the duke was a leader of the Armagnac, he sought to conciliate between the two groups. The imposing castle here bears the blue and gold banners of Burgundy; perhaps the scene is related to the duke’s diplomacy."

“All the 172 miniatures of the Limbourg brothers have a vivacity and colourfulness that secure for them a place in the history of illumination. Every miniature and every page of the text of the Belles Heures of Jean Duke of Berry is surrounded by decorative filigree scrollwork with up to 500 gold glowing ivy leaves. But even this sumptuous decoration is excelled by the playfully arranged luminous elements on the prime pages introducing the Office of the Virgin and the Office of the Dead. This luxurious decoration, which is extraordinarily exuberant even for a Book of Hours from the ducal library, achieves perfection in the use of countless ornamented initials that extend over one or several lines and are painted in red, blue and glowing gold – the colours of the ducal crest. The combination of gold leaf and shell gold in the miniatures creates permanently glowing and glittering effects. The fruitful combination of his generous patronage and their unique talent brought about a working atmosphere of unmatched creativity without which a masterpiece such as the Belles Heures would never have been possible.”

Of them all, the Duc de berry seems to have had the greatest love for his collection, and the closest relationship with the artists he employed. Much of the duke’s enormous collection has disappeared. During his lifetime, he was occasionally forced to sell gems and melt down precious gold jewels to pay his soldiers. Over the centuries the tapestries that brought warmth and color to drab castle walls have almost all disappeared; most of the castles the duke built have crumbled. But, of the nearly three hundred manuscripts known to have been in his library, about a third remain today. Portable and relatively easy to protect, the books are his enduring legacy.

aption-text">"Diocrès, Bruno, and Carthusians Diocrès Cries out from his Coffin, Folio 94v When the deceased scholar lifts his coffin lid to cry out during his funeral, the attendant monks react with expressions ranging from dismay to wonderment to horror. The scene takes place in a deep space in a cathedral, seen behind a framing double arcade."

Books of Hours first came into use at the end of the fourteenth century as a devotional aid for members of the upper class, who often had their own private chapels. Rich in marvelous and often bloody detail, the lives of the saints made a Book of Hours enjoyable as a storybook as well as a spiritual guide. Since there was no prescribed iconography for a Book of Hours, the artists who illustrated them were free, within the confines of the patron’s wishes, of course, to introduce new subjects and designs. A noble gentleman or lady commissioning a Book of Hours knew that the result would be  a truly original work of art.

"Belles Heures of Jean of France, Duc of Berry, 1405–1408/9. Herman, Paul, and Jean Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. Folio 30r, The Annunciation. Ink, tempera, and gold leaf on vellum. 9 3/8 x 6 5/8 in. (23.8 x 16.8 cm). The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1)."

The Duc de Berry, with typical extravagance, commissioned six of them, each elaborately illuminated. Certainly beauty was as important to the duke as religious significance. Millard Meiss, the noted art historian pointed out,” Prayer alone and contemplation of the Christian mysteries would scarcely have required an entire series of manuscripts of this kind, even though each painter told the stories in a somewhat different way.”  Only the dukes best “enlumineurs” worked on the Book of Hours” , and among the best were three brothers, Paul, Jean and Herman of Limbourg.

"Hours of the Virgin The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Folio 52r The illumination for Terce shows two shepherds reacting with awe to the vision of three singing angels announcing the birth of Jesus. A dog lies near the woods, and a goat rises on its hind legs to graze on a tree. Atmospheric perspective shades the distant city into blue, while accuracy in scale is ignored in the rendering of trees."

Not all the miniatures of the “Belles Heures” are religious in nature. Scenes from the secular life; threshing of wheat, trmapling of grapes, slaughtering of a pig; mark the seasons on the pages of the calendar. The first of the two portraits of the duke depicts him in a splendid blue robe and kneeling at prayer in his private oratory. A grand and vigorous seignior, he appears to be in his late thirties or early forties. The Limbourg brothers must have known the value of flattery, for the duke was at least sixty-five at the time. Since the portrait face one of Jeanne de Boulogne, Berry’s second wife, then in her twenties, youthful appearance was important. Even in an age of loveless marriage, Berry was chastised for unseemly lust when, at forty-nine, he took a bride of twelve.

"Great Litany The Procession of Flagellants, Folio 74v This unusual, dramatic, chilling yet beautifully rendered scene shows a litany procession as practiced in Europe in the days of the Limbourgs, with penitents whipping themselves and each other. The dragon pennant flying after the cross follows a custom in France. The garb of the flagellants includes both the hoods common in Italy and the wide-brimmed hats with bare torsos more typical in the North. This is one of the scenes that demonstrates the artists’ skill, daring, and innovation in representing the nude human body."

In 1416 another scourge of the age, epidemic disease, apparently took the lives of all three of the Limbourg brothers. Within six months, their patron was himself dead at the age of seventy-five. His vast collection was dispersed. Not much is known of the manuscript’s peregrinations until the nineteenth century, when it turned up in the collection of the Baron d’Ailly and from there passed into the handsof Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Since 1954 the “Belles Heures” has been one of the prized holdings of The Cloisters in New York City. Over six hundred years later, its miniatures are as fresh as on the day the Limbourg brothers put down their brushes and delivered the completed manuscript to the duke. He would be pleased.

"Fifteen Joys of the Virgin The Duke of Berry in Prayer, Folio 91r On a page with the concluding text of the “Fifteen Joys of the Virgin” is a half-page illumination of the duke in prayer, identified by his royal ermine and fleur-de-lis cloth. Although he was in his sixties when the page was painted, he is here represented as a younger man. Close looking reveals changes in the painting: the duke’s coronet replaces a turban-like head covering, and the position of the duke was not originally in strict profile. Spatial and iconographic ambiguities surround the second figure in the scene, a partially obscured attendant bearing a mace."

“The Belles Heures is unusual among books of hours in that a cycle on the life of St. Catherine precedes the Hours of the Virgin. The duke was drawn to Catherine’s erudition, and the Limbourgs took care to portray her as a scholar; the image that opens the cycle shows Catherine in her book-filled study.

The artists, however, seem to have been captivated by the grisly elements of Catherine’s story. They depicted her torture at the hands of the emperor Maxentius and chose to illustrate not only Catherine’s beheading but those of the empress Faustina and the emperor’s guardsman Porphyrius. Oddly, the Limbourgs did not feature the saint’s vision of the Virgin or her mystical marriage to Christ.

"Here, too, the Limbourgs use color with intensity and precision. The landscape is an exquisitely variegated green, and the blue of Catherine’s robe owes its brilliance to an expensive pigment imported from Afghanistan."

This painting of Catherine, at the moment just before her beheading, is one of the most compelling images in the Belles Heures. Out of context, it could be a frame from a contemporary graphic novel. A series of diagonals draws the eye right to Catherine’s exposed neck as the executioner readies his sword. The torqued, mountainous form in the background adds to the tension.” ( Karen Rosenberg )

“It’s both shocking and refreshing to see Christian art from this period take a more explicit route. Illustrations in the Belles Heures take on many tones- they can be violent, graphic, sexually suggestive, charming and even humorous. The Limbourg brothers also understood that pictorial messages could be conveyed in more subtle ways as well, and had a great talent for imbuing emotion through facial expression and body language, which was quite uncommon for the time.

In Folio 184, the fellow monks of the uptight St. Jerome play a practical joke on him during his pre-dawn awakening, switching his traditional robes with a Rupaul-esque number in a glamorous blue.

Some of the most memorable visions come from unfamiliar stories. For example, the cycle of Saints Paul and Anthony depicts the circumstances that led St. Paul to become a hermit. Here, we see a voluptuous woman seducing a young man while Paul looks on in the background. The young man resists her advances by biting off the tip of his own tongue and spitting it in the woman’s face. The Limbourg brothers do not spare us the gory details- a close inspection reveals the spray of blood.

In another, more lighthearted illustration finds St. Jerome’s fellow monks playing a practical joke on him. The derided saint is tricked into putting on a woman’s dress instead of his monk habit and arrives for morning prayers as a medieval cross-dresser. This episode is said to have put St. Jerome over the edge and into hermit cave of solitary confinement.” ( Victoria Romeo )