FAR FROM THE REQUIREMENTS OF PIETY

The elder uncle of Charles VI started perhaps, the greatest and most extravagant spending spree in the history of the world to that time. His collection itself was a work of art. Jean, Duc de Berry, was more intellectual than warrior, more a puller of strings than a weilder of battle-axes. Christine de Pisan, one of the first professional woman writers, describes him as handsome, amiable, wise in council, cautious in action, ” of sweet and kindly intercourse with no prideful hauteur, benignant in address and response, cheery in conversation, and in all things very considerate.”

''L'entrée dans l'Arche de Noé.  Enluminure de Jacquemard de Hesdin, XVe s., France.''

''L'entrée dans l'Arche de Noé. Enluminure de Jacquemard de Hesdin, XVe s., France.''

But Christine, who loved by the favor of great patrons, could remark no evil in them. Others reported Duke John to be debauched, spendthrift, and little esteemed in the kingdom. Certainly, he outdid all his predecessors in the harshness of his tax collections. The people toiled and suffered to support art. This, he thought, was a good thing. Maybe it was, if art is greater than life.

At any rate, Sir John was a great builder, art patron and collector. He built seventeen important castles and other edifices, most of them now in ruins or in dust. He restored the castle of Poitiers, with its superb great hall, and supplied the central facade of the cathedral at Bourges. He had his own staff of jewelers and goldsmiths , and his own artists, some of whom, like Jacquemart de Hesdin and the Limbourg Brothers, are by no means forgotten. He appointed the painter Andre Beauneveu his commissioner for the arts; he also had a purchasing agent in Italy, one of the first art dealers. Duke John, wearing his hat adorned with sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and pearls, was himself an art object, a dazzlement, a chef-d’oeuvre in his own collection.

''This is larger than any of the Duke’s other Book of Hours and was probably illuminated mainly by the Pseudo-Jacquemart. John of Valois (1340-1416) was the third son of King John II of France and Bonne of Luxemburg; amongst his siblings were Charles V, King of France, Louis I, King of Naples and Philip II (Philip the Bold), Duke of Burgundy. His several titles included Duke of Berry and Auvergne and Count of Poitiers and Montpensier. He was a notable patron who commissioned among other works, several Book of Hours. The Petites Heures (Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. lat. 18.014) ''

''This is larger than any of the Duke’s other Book of Hours and was probably illuminated mainly by the Pseudo-Jacquemart. John of Valois (1340-1416) was the third son of King John II of France and Bonne of Luxemburg; amongst his siblings were Charles V, King of France, Louis I, King of Naples and Philip II (Philip the Bold), Duke of Burgundy. His several titles included Duke of Berry and Auvergne and Count of Poitiers and Montpensier. He was a notable patron who commissioned among other works, several Book of Hours. The Petites Heures (Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. lat. 18.014) ''

Duke John possessed a mountain of gems; diamonds, rubies, pearls, jaspers, garnets, amethysts, rock crystals, cat’s-eyes, toadstones, corals, and nore than fifteen hundred cameos and intaglios. He liked to break down crude bijouterie and have the stones reassembled according to his own designs. Thus he made suitable reliquaries for a piece of Saint Lawrence’s grill, a twig from the Burning Bush, the leg of a Holy Innocent, the head of one of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. He made shrines for the Virgin’s wedding ring, for a wine cuip used in the marriage at Cana, for a scrap from the mantle of Elijah.


In Italy, Duke John’s agent bought Greek vases, sculptures, medals of Augustus and Tiberius, ancient coins. In his passion for collecting he would collect almost anything; tapestries from Arras, embroideries from FLorence and England, leather hangings from Spain, a ”Wunderkammer” of natural curiosities: a snake’s jaws, a porcupine’s quill, an elephant’s molar. He even collected dogs; he is said to have possessed fifteen hundred, mostly, no doubt, in hunting packs at his country castle’s. But the banquet scene is his ”Tres Riches Heures” shows a dog on the floor and two puppies on the very table.

Tres Riches Heures. Banquet Scene

Tres Riches Heures. Banquet Scene

His chief passion was for books, which in his day, were of course, in manuscript. His library numbered about three hundred volumes, fewer than his brother Charles had owned, but chose with more discrimination. Duke John loved the beauty and personality of books; he loved also to read their words. He was especially fond of romances of chivalry. At one time he ordered some low-standing ivory candlesticks ”to hold candles for reading romances.” A real bibliophile, he carried a precious Book of Hours to war with him. Confronting in the field of battle the English commander, the Duke of Bedford, another connoisseur, he arranged to postpone the engagement while Bedford visited him in his tent to inspect the treasure.

Under the patronage of Jean de Berry the art of book illustration found a new development. The decoration of books was originally an ecclesiastical art, practiced by monks for the glory of God. By the thirteenth century book illustration and ornamentation became in some part a secular trade , in the hands of professionals in Paris and Italy.


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"Saint Nicholas Saves Travelers at Sea," Herman, Paul and Jean de Limbourg, The Belles Heures of Jean de France

In the early fourteenth-century new concepts, purposes, and freedoms entered the world of art. The Sienese painters developed theories of perspective, modeling and the treatment of light and shadow; in fact three dimensional art. About 1320 Jean Pucelle in Paris introduced coherent perspective and modeling by light and shade. His successors set their figured in the round against a receding landscape, with close observation and rendering of detail. Such techniques promoted the concept of realism, or naturalism, that is, the exact rendering of reality. The concept was foreshadowed in the work of observant artists in England, Picardy and the Netherlands; it took form in Italian wall painting and migrated to French book-illustration; it then found its great efflorescence in the panel painting , or easel painting, of the Van Eycks and others in the Netherlands.

At the same time, technical advances were made in the preparation of vellum and fine paper and in the composition and use of colors. The trade secrets were very precious. The historian Cartellieri noted that ” a collaborator of Jacquemart de Hesdin, Jan van Holland, guarded the secrets of his colors so closely that one, when he suspected an assistant of having broken open his box, a fight with daggers ensued, and an artisan was left dead on the spot.”

The Book of Hours

The Book of Hours

The Book of Hours was a fourteenth-century innovation. It was a prayer book, a companion for the pious during Church services, an aid to private devotions. The text was variable, suiting the convenience of the scribe. If one’s attention wandered during the office, one could look at the pictures, which might stray far from the requirements of piety. The Book of Hours was a showpiece; as Erwin Panofsky says, it was part of a great lady’s equipment, with her rosary, jewel box, and bottle of exotic scent.

''Jean Pucelle’s Annunciation panel in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux is key to Panofsky’s argument, because it reconfigures the two-dimensional plane of the page with the three-dimensional architecture of the Virgin’s chamber, thereby creating opportunities for multiple apertures and enclosures that suggest both exterior and interior spaces (Figure 3). Although the lectern of the Virgin has receded into the background, books and reading are still important motifs in the scene: in the bottom left corner we can see the female patron reading inside the capital "D."

''Jean Pucelle’s Annunciation panel in the Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux is key to Panofsky’s argument, because it reconfigures the two-dimensional plane of the page with the three-dimensional architecture of the Virgin’s chamber, thereby creating opportunities for multiple apertures and enclosures that suggest both exterior and interior spaces (Figure 3). Although the lectern of the Virgin has receded into the background, books and reading are still important motifs in the scene: in the bottom left corner we can see the female patron reading inside the capital "D."

The subjects of the illustrations were originally, and generally, pietistic. They were often arranged in the form of a ”calendar” , a series of pictures depicting the Christian year or the outward look of the successive months by their characteristic activities. In the hurly-burly of such activities the devotional purpose was likely to disappear. Early in the fourteenth-century Jean Pucelle eliminated the figures, substituting the changing aspects of nature. This said, Erwin Panofsky, was a ”revolutionary shift of interest”.

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