Herman, Paul, and Jean de Limbourg, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

0:00This is the Belles Heures, meaning, “beautiful Book of Hours,” an aid to private devotion, began with a calendar identifying all the major feast days and then individual saint’s days. Anyone with a manuscript Book of Hours had to have a certain means: with 172 illuminations, commissioned by Jean de France, Duke of Berry.

0:28The three Limbourg Brothers he engaged to illuminate it ranged in age from fourteen or fifteen to nineteen and twenty, clearly prodigies of the highest order. In the center of the book, the first to be illuminated, they’re struggling with their compositional arrangements, but as they progress, they become incredibly inventive. One thing that distinguishes the Belles Heures are the picture book insertions devoted either to saints or to events in Christian history that appealed to the duke.

1:07One of the images is that of a Christian being tempted by the Devil in the form of a very attractive young woman. The Limbourg brothers were trying to link the illuminations in a narrative continuum, and as they progress they come up with really extraordinarily inventive devices to enhance the cohesion of the narrative.

1:38They were amongst the very first artists in the North to introduce atmospheric perspective. They depicted the effect of light, both moon and sunlight, off of natural forms, to create a landscape more naturalistic than had ever been introduced to the North before.

2:05What the eye instantly perceives, the brain slowly processes. Studying these picture book cycles, I suddenly realized that one’s own ability to appreciate this Book as an astonishing work of art increases with our own accumulated experience. I think that was part of the process that took far longer for me than it did for the Limbourg brothers to produce it in the first place.