MMA's Belles Heures Going to Getty
NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art to Lend Medieval Manuscript to L.A.
The J. Paul Getty Museum will present "The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry" in 2008 and 2009.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California will be hosting The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition will be on view from November 18, 2008 to February 8, 2009.
The Exhibition
On display will be all 94 full-page sumptuously illuminated folios (pages) from the Belles Heures (1405-1408/09), a book of hours or private devotional prayers commissioned by Jean of France, Duke of Berry (1340-1416) from the Franco-Netherlandish artists Pol, Jean and Herman de Limbourg (act. by 1399, d. 1416). Jean was the brother of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342-1404). His lavish patronage of the arts severely strained his realm's finances.
The Belles Heures and the Très Riches Heures
The Belles Heures, produced in Paris or Bourges, is an ink, tempera and gold leaf on vellum (processed animal hide) work in The Cloisters Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the only completed manuscript by the Limbourg Brothers. One of the few books to have survived from the duke's extensive library, its painted images illustrate Jean's personal and religious interests in a naturalistic style that anticipates similar works by the early Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck (act. by 1422, d. 1441) and his 15th-century northern European contemporaries.
The Limbourgs are perhaps best known for their 12 illuminated miniatures of the months in the Très Riches Heures (1412-1416) for the Duke of Berry, a manuscript in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. The volume was left unfinished by the artists upon all four men's untimely deaths from unknown causes in 1416. Once in the possession of René d'Anjou (1409-1480), the duke's royal cousin enlisted the so-called Master of the Shadows, probably the court painter Barthélemy van Eyck (about 1420-after 1470), to continue work on the book in the 1440s. Under the subsequent patronage of Charles I, Duke of Savoy (1468-1490), the text's illustrations were completed by Jean Colombe (later 15th Century) between 1485 and 1489.
Conservation and Display
A recent restoration of the Belles Heures and production of a facsimile edition determined that the book be expertly unbound and its pages carefully separated. As a result, one folio from the manuscript depicting St. Catherine of Alexandria was on view in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) at The Met (March 24-July 5, 2004). And 10 double pages from the volume were part of the 2005 special exhibition The van Limbourg Brothers, Nijmegen Masters at the French Court (1400-1416) at the Het Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The subjects on display were:
- Angels Destroying the Wheel and St. Catherine at the Whipping Post;
- Annunciation to the Shepherds;
- David Admonished by the Prophet David and Flight to Egypt;
- Jean de Berry at Prayer;
- La Grande Chartreuse and Diocrès Expounding on the Scriptures;
- Christ Carrying the Cross;
- Lamentation and Entombment;
- Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins and Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata;
- Funeral of St. Jerome and St. Jerome Studying Pagan Philosophy; and
- Death of St. Anthony and Seduction of a Christian.
The Belles Heures' entire contents on view in the upcoming Getty Museum presentation is an opportunity only to be repeated at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Fall 2009.
Sources:
- Dückers, Rob and Pieter Roelofs (eds.). The Brothers van Limburg (exh. cat.). Nijmegen: Ludion, 2005.
- Meiss, Millard and Elizabeth H. Beatson. The Belles Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1974.
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