With its sumptuous painted miniatures in tempera and ink, gold and silver, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is the most treasured illuminated manuscript of the collections of Château de Chantilly, yet it has barely been seen in public. That will change this year, as the late-Medieval prayer book undergoes delicate conservation before its starring role in a major exhibition at Chantilly (7 June-6 October).
A princely collector, Jean de Valois, Duke of Berry, commissioned the manuscript around 1411 from three Netherlandish painters, the brothers Herman, Paul and Johan Limbourg. Such books of hours served as calendars guiding the private devotion of lay Christians, including daily prayer times and major feast days of the year. After the Limbourg brothers and the duke died in 1416, a series of patrons and master illuminators oversaw the book’s creation over the next eight decades, a slow-burn collective process that has drawn parallels with the construction of a Medieval cathedral.
‘A gallery of paintings’
Although books of hours were common in the late Middle Ages, Très Riches Heures is exceptional for the scores of exquisite decorations that fill its 200-plus pages. “You almost have a gallery of paintings within this calendar,” says the director of Chantilly’s Condé Museum, Mathieu Deldicque.
The manuscript’s significance helped persuade the Tefaf Museum Restoration Fund to allocate Chantilly its maximum annual grant of €50,000 in support of the project, Deldicque says. The château is also running a crowdfunding campaign to secure the remaining funding needed to complete all the conservation and research, he adds, with donors invited to “adopt” one of the painted miniature scenes on its pages.
On 15 March, Deldicque will present a behind-the-scenes talk about the Très Riches Heures at Tefaf Maastricht, together with the conservators Coralie Barbe and Patricia Engel. The book’s condition is fragile but “not desperate”, he says; the restoration aims to clean its binding and vellum borders as well as repair cracks in the illuminations. The first phase began in January and will prepare the manuscript for display at Chantilly, when the calendar’s 12 monthly folios—which depict the changing seasons of rural life in fine detail—will appear unbound. A second phase will then be completed after the show’s closure, between October and the end of 2025.
The exhibition will give the Très Riches Heures pride of place among around 100 loans of manuscripts and works of art from libraries and museums all over the world, including New York’s Morgan Library & Museum and the Met Cloisters. The show includes the reunion of the Duke of Berry’s personal library of prayer books and even his marble tomb, borrowed from Bourges Cathedral, Deldicque says, along with works inspired by the “revolutionary” paintings of the Limbourgs. A section will also be dedicated to scientific insights from the analysis and conservation project.
In addition to supporting new research, Deldicque says the involvement of the Tefaf Museum Restoration Fund is critical to raising international awareness of a Medieval treasure that, for all its renown among scholars, has only been displayed twice before at Chantilly, in 1956 and 2004. “It’s like the manuscript was never shown before, and that’s why this [exhibition] is such an event,” he says. “I thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to have the most important fair for the Old Master art market help one of the most important manuscripts.”
• Books of Hours: a History in Objects, Château de Chantilly, 7 June-6 October
