From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
This summer in Chantilly there is a chance to see the most famous of late medieval manuscripts in a way that will never happen again. The Très Riches Heures, billed in the exhibition’s opportunistic marketing as the ‘Mona Lisa of manuscripts’, is nevertheless worthy of that title. It is undoubtedly iconic, an object with an aura, reproduced endlessly, written about extensively, feeding popular and scholarly imaginations. The miniatures that accompany the calendar at the start of the prayerbook continue to define our image of the Middle Ages, while the other full-page miniatures throughout the volume include extraordinary inventions such as the Zodiacal Man, the Map of Rome and depictions of the night sky.
The manuscript itself has a colourful history: it was begun around 1411 by three young artists, the Limbourg brothers, for the discerning and covetous Jean, Duc de Berry, son, brother and uncle to successive kings of France, whose reputation as a lover of books, gems, exotic objects and ‘choses estranges’ was well established in his own lifetime. Its decoration was interrupted by the death of the duke and all three of his artists in 1416, probably from the plague: at that moment, its unfinished, unbound folios were itemised as loose in a box, with an extremely high value of 500 livres, above almost all of the duke’s other manuscripts. His post-mortem inventory, unusually, identifies the artists – ‘Pol et ses freres’ – intimating that the worth of this ‘tres riches heures’ was already defined by the extraordinary nature of the paintings it contained.
The whereabouts of the manuscript for the next hundred years, its owners, its state and stages of completion, the number and identity of the artists who worked on it under the duke and subsequently, even its order and contents remain somewhat mysterious. It seems to have been in French royal hands, possibly with Charles VII or René of Anjou in the 1440s, then with Charles I of Savoy in the 1480s, likely ending up with Margaret of Austria in the 1520s. It disappeared from sight again until it surfaced in a girls’ school in Genoa in 1856 and was acquired by the Duke of Aumale – who left his collection, with the Château de Chantilly, to the Institut de France. It is an exceedingly complex masterpiece, posing challenges of attribution and interpretation, made more so by its inaccessibility. Seen by only a handful of scholars, it has been displayed just twice in the last 80 years, in 1956 and 2004. This is less to do with fragility than with its perceived value; the policy has surely increased its mythic status. Moreover, the terms of Aumale’s will do not allow for it to be loaned. The manuscript has therefore never been seen in the wider context of the landmark exhibitions on French and Flemish art around 1400 held since the study of Les Primitifs français took shape in the early 1900s, nor in shows exploring Netherlandish painting before Van Eyck, in which it certainly plays a role.
The current exhibition is a major undertaking, in the display of the manuscript, its restoration and study, and in bringing a large number of significant works to Chantilly to elucidate its history and influence. The aim, according to the weighty and beautifully illustrated catalogue, is to ‘make the manuscript, and it alone – not its first patron nor its artists – the centre of attention’. The exhibition achieves this, in part, by starting with the manuscript’s rediscovery, acquisition and identification in the 19th century, as documented in letters and papers, and ending with its afterlife in popular reproduction. In between, the focus on the book rather than the man or his artists is less evident, as Jean de Berry, the Limbourgs and their artistic milieu take up much of the square footage of the show.
This starts with the duke himself, his image and his emblems, well represented by the major loan of his marble tomb effigy, usually only visible at floor level in the rather dark crypt of Bourges cathedral; it is shown here at an appropriate height, allowing for close inspection. Surrounding this are other works associated with Berry’s foundation of the Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges, and then a long run of 15 manuscripts representing the 300-odd he acquired or commissioned in his lifetime. These are grouped by subject (theology, philosophy, history, astrology), demonstrating the breadth of his interests, not just artistically but in terms of intellectual content, of stories, of devotional and historical texts, all of which his artists could draw on. Here the demands of some institutions to display manuscripts barely open is a frustration. Moving from the patron to the artists, the Limbourgs’ work prior to the Très Riches Heures is displayed in a marvellous sweep of the duke’s surviving prayerbooks, including the celebrated Belles Heures, and helps contextualise the scale and ambition of his last project.
But before we reach the main event, there is another series of manuscripts by artists who either knew the book in Paris between the 1410s and the 1430s or contributed to its completion; this section concludes with a number of works by painters who responded to its inventions in the late 15th and early 16th century – most wholeheartedly the Flemish miniaturist Simon Bening, who understood its calendar inventions thoroughly. As the Très Riches Heures itself does not appear until the end, the relevance of many of these exhibits to what lies ahead has to be indicated through thumbnail reproductions on labels. While this arrangement means the show builds to the book as denouement, invariably some parts of what come before might make less sense to the non-specialist. The tight space must have imposed considerable restrictions, but a show that had the Très Riches Heures at its physical heart, with parts radiating out, might have visualised its centrality rather better.
The exhibition’s major selling point, and the reason to make the trip to Chantilly, is that the first two quires of the manuscript containing the famous calendar miniatures have been unbound and are displayed separately, as part of an ongoing restoration. The result is that it is possible to view not just the bound volume – in a rota of openings that changes every two weeks – but to experience face-to-face the 12 full-page calendar scenes on their six bifolios, suspended vertically in specially designed cases.
The decision to unbind these leaves cannot have been easy, and finding a way to display them without undue transmitted light must have been even trickier. The solution, with in-case lighting from below, is ingenious but only partially successful. The floating leaves are presented as objects, with every edge visible, but they are also unnaturally flat, and upright, their status as small paintings reasserted; their nature as book illumination, on flexible parchment, designed to be seen in sequence, is suppressed. The in-case lighting de-saturates the pigments and reduces their opacity, washing out much of the detail, dimming their intensity. It reveals too, at times, the trace of the brush, or the order of work, but makes the paint appear sparse and thin. Indeed, the effect is such that for a moment one assumes there are losses, but mostly this is show-through where the application is less dense around the edges of figures or forms. The high-resolution digitisation available on screens close by is vital here: one needs to move between this and the leaves to check the distorting effects of the transmitted light. Some miniatures fare worse than others: we lose the detail of the corn in the fields in June, of the churned mud in March, while the white glow between the trees and the towers of Vincennes in December is entirely down to transmitted light.
The display of any manuscript unbound is potentially confusing, even to those well versed in the structure of the book; the order is disrupted and miniatures rarely face their appropriate text. In the exhibition, February’s snow scene is painted on the same side of the same sheet as the calendar for June, while on its reverse is the miniature for July, facing the text for January. Seeing the book like this can have its uses, certainly: it presents the sheets as the painters would receive and work on them, as unbound bifolios. The division of labour might reasonably be expected to follow suit, providing the art historian with an aid to attribution, or at least a place to start. Indeed, one of the great opportunities the unbound calendar presents is a chance to reconsider the vexed question of who painted what in this section of the manuscript, which is by far the most controversial, and where all of the three main stages of its work are in evidence. There are two, maybe three of the Limbourgs who may have drawn all the compositions but left several in various stages of incompletion; then, as was only realised in the 1970s, an ‘intermediate painter’ intervened, sometimes in subtle ways, in the late 1430s or ’40s, before Jean Colombe, a prolific illuminator active in the 1480s, more or less completed the manuscript. The trickiest division by far is between the Limbourgs and the intermediate artist, here identified (on slim evidence) as René of Anjou’s court painter, Barthélemy d’Eyck. Whoever it was, they often completed the Limbourgs’ unfinished miniatures with sophisticated observation of aerial recession, weather and light, notably in October: their figures cast shadows, and reflections in the water, the Limbourgs’ do not. These questions of authorship and identity have been at the heart of scholarship on the Très Riches Heures since it was rediscovered, and remain central to the way this show is conceived and constructed.
Though seeing all 12 calendar scenes at once provides an unprecedented chance to rethink the manuscript’s making and attribution, there is a price to pay: unbound, it is impossible to display them in their intended sequence. The double-sided cases encourage ambulation, to walk around the folio, upending further any sense of order, so vital for the way the calendar progresses through the seasons, often wittily subverting the imagery of one in the next. The journey through the changing weather, skies, the leaves of the trees, the activities of work and play in fields and waterways is disrupted, or at least less evident. But even out of order, the chance to focus intently on the variety and invention of these miniatures and their observational and imagined detail is not to be missed: the footsteps in the snow in February, the figures rushing to shelter from the fast-moving storm in March, the fishing boats trawling with their net in April, barefoot peasants wielding scythes in June, the rock weighing down the harrow, the scarecrow-archer and the netting protecting the newly sown furrows in October, or the slobbering dogs in December. These are extraordinary portraits of places, of labour and leisure, the land as well as the buildings, with the painters abandoning their conventional landscape formula of spiralling, interlocking hills to produce an actual, observed place, its roads and rivers as well as its castle or chateau. When they are viewed en masse in one space, as here, our appreciation of the artists’ achievements is multiplied. Go and marvel at their ability to evoke seasons and weather, to depict vistas and turrets, grass, mud, smoke, tools, trees, skies and clothing, half-naked swimmers, suggestively placed daggers and unexpected glimpses of genitalia; one can only wonder what these contemporaries of Van Eyck might have done if they had lived longer.
‘Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry’ is at the Château de Chantilly until 5 October.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
