The Due de Berry
collected only precious things: jewels, Italian cloth woven from gold,
valuable musical instruments, porcelain, timepieces, embroidered
tapestries and reliquaries. He owned seventeen castles, a zoo with
ostriches, camels, chamois, a tooth of Charlemagne's and the finest ruby
collection of his day. But books were his first love. His library
contained Roman classics, chronicles, chansons
de geste and an edition of
The Travels of Marco Polo.
A true connoisseur, the Due de Berry never missed a
chance to indulge in pomp and luxury. The Due de Berry, or Jean de France,
was the son of the French King Jean II. so he could afford such expensive
taste. And when his money ran low, he could simply raise the taxes in
central France, an area which fell mostly under his rule.
The Duke was not just a consumer of extravagant things,
but also an active patron of the arts, commissioning countless artists and
artisans. Some of his most famous commissions were Books of Hours. These illuminated
manuscripts contained prayers which the laity recited in their personal
devotions, so-called because the prayers were to be said at particular
times of the day.
The Due de Berry owned several Books of Hours, and, in
1413, he commissioned the
Limbourg brothers
to execute Les Tres Riches Hams, which became his most
valuable example. The preliminary work for this book was actually
completed by another artist who died shortly after receiving the
commission. When the three brothers from Nijmegen in the Netherlands
started to work on this book, they were all in their thirties and must
have realised that this would be the work of a lifetime. In 1416, all
three brothers died, as did their patron, probably from one of the many
epidemics rampant at that time throughout Europe.
Les Tres Riches Heures,
with its 206 leaves, was actually never finished. Despite
this, it is regarded as one of the greatest works of European medieval
art: the finest fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript and a supreme
example of painting in the International Gothic style. Here, for the first
time in the history of manuscript illumination, idealistic landscapes were
replaced by real landscapes, in this case depicting the regions belonging
to the Due de Berry. The Month of August shows the Chateau
d'Etampes, a massive twelfth-century castle which still looms above the
countryside today. In this calendar cycle, August is the only one
to depict courtiers and peasants together in the same scene. The court,
however, does not come into contact with the peasants, who labour in the
hot fields and bathe in a stream, while the court solemnly passes by on
horseback in the foreground. How different peasant existence must have
been from that of the Due de Berry's: oatmeal instead of capons, water
instead of wine and straw mattresses instead of featherbeds.
