Description
These small miniatures illustrate the Labors of the Months and the Signs of the Zodiac for five of the twelve months from a medieval calendar, most likely a Book of Hours. The months and their subjects are: January, a man feasting and Aquarius emptying his water pot; February, a man warming his feet by a hearth; August, Virgo the young woman; October, a man sowing seed and Scorpio the scorpion; November, a man knocking acorns from a tree to feed his pigs. The narrow gold framing around the top, bottom, and outer side of each cutting demonstrates that they were paired within a single gold-edged rectangle, the Labor on the left, the Zodiac on the right. By examining the reverses of the fragments, it is apparent that the man feasting used to be joined to Aquarius and the man sowing to Scorpio; the other cuttings come from three different months.
The finely painted calendar quatrefoils relate to two manuscripts associated with the Duke of Berry: the first, the Très Belles Heures described as by Jacquemart de Hesdin in the Duke’s inventory in 1403 (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, MSS 1160-61) and the second the Belles Heures of Jean Duke of Berry created in its entirety by the Limbourg Brothers between 1405 and 1408 or 1409. There are certain shared compositions (the Labors of February and October, Virgo, Scorpio) as well as the quatrefoil shape that frames the images. However, their style comes closer to that of the Luçon Master, known to have collaborated with Jacquemart de Hesdin in the first decade of the fifteenth century. The protruding faces with straight nose, small lips and eyes are very characteristic of the Master of Luçon, as are the swollen draperies and the palette of light hues. Typically, he is not interested in creating realistic spatial settings; the figures occupy the minimal green grounds suggesting landscape and are set either on decorated orange and gold checkerboard-like patterns or plain blue skies. For comparable male figures, their poses and costumes, compare especially the Adoration of the Magi from a Book of Hours (London, British Library, Ms Yates Thompson 37), which also has an orange and gold decorative background, and King David with his Psalter from a Psalter-Hours (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 1082), similarly set in a framed quatrefoil.
The horizontal layout of the calendar miniatures, attached one to the other with borders of blue and red, closely resembles that of November in the so-called Hours of Joseph Bonaparte from the Boucicaut Workshop (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 10538, f. 12r), with which the iconography is also similar excepting January. One of the innovative motifs of our small images are the rays of sun that accompany the Signs of the Zodiac. Similar rays occur in the border of Widener 4 (Philadelphia, Free Library, f. 1) by the Luçon Master’s workshop, where they allude to the emblem of King Charles VI, although they could refer to the sun crossing the sky as in the Très Riches Heures. Just what manuscript these miniatures once adorned is unknown; they are probably unrelated to the three single sheets with which they shared a page in the Album. One manuscript by the Luçon Master that is long missing its first half, including the calendar, with comparable style and approximate date, is the Book of Hours at Harvard University (Houghton Library, MS Richardson 45).
We are grateful to Inès Villela-Petit and Elliot Adam for their expertise.
provenance
Peter Birmann (1758–1844), Basel painter and art dealer of medieval miniatures in the wake of the French Revolution and first owner of Jean Fouquet’s miniatures of the Hours of Etienne Chevalier; Daniel Burkhardt-Wildt (1752–1819), Basel silk manufacturer and co-founder of the Basler Kunstlergeschellschaft, these three miniatures assembled in an album, the “Burkhardt-Wildt Album,” sold at Sotheby’s London, April 25, 1983, lot 100;
Quaritch for (?) Neil F. Phillips, Q.C. (1924–1997), New York, Montreal, and Virginia, his no. 1065;
resold Sotheby’s London, December 2, 1997, lot 62;
and again Christie’s London, November 20, 2013, lot 38;
Sandra Hindman, The Art Institute of Chicago, on deposit, 2018–2024; exhibited 27 January to 28 May 2018.
literature
Published:
de Hamel, Christopher, and Matthew Westerby. The Medieval World at Our Fingertips: Manuscript Illuminations from the Collection of Sandra Hindman. London, Turnhout, 2018., pp. 74-85, no. 6;
Related Literature:
Meiss, Millard. French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry. 2 vols. London, 1967, vol. I, 358–59, vol. II, 393–97;
Sterling, Charles. La peinture médiévale à Paris, 1300–1500. 2 vols. Paris, 1987–1990, vol. 1, 22, 325, 327, 425, 434, 501;
Avril, François. “Un chef d’oeuvre inédit de l’enluminure parisienne autour de 1400.” In Art de l’Enluminure 8 (2004): 2–7;
Taburet-Delahaye, Elisabeth. Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI. Paris, 2004, no. 171;
Wieck in Hamburger, Jeffrey, William P. Stoneman, Anne-Marie Eze, Lisa Fagin Davis, and Nancy Netzer, eds. Beyond Words; Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. Boston, 2016, no. 101, 114–15.
learn
Luçon Master, France, Paris, active 1390-1417
Active in Paris from the 1390s to around 1417, the Luçon Master was first named by Millard Meiss in 1968 after illuminations in a Pontifical-Missal commissioned by the bishop of Luçon, Etienne Loypeau, for presentation to his protector, Jean the Duke of Berry, in his chapel in the Sainte-Chapelle in Bourges between 1404 and 1407 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 8886). Charles Sterling suggested that a more appropriate name would be the Master of Etienne Loypeau. He was active by 1401, when Colin le Besc, who supplied manuscripts to the dukes of Berry and Orleans, dated a Book of Hours containing illuminations by him and the Master of the Cité des Dames (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya y central, MS 1850). He must have headed a busy workshop for Meiss attributed thirty-seven manuscripts to him, and in subsequent decades others have been accepted as belonging to his oeuvre. In addition to the Pontifical-Missal, the Luçon Master illuminated other works for the Duke of Berry, including a devotional text L’ aiguillon d’amour divin for the Duke’s daughter Marie (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 926) and a Terence des ducs for the Dauphin Louis duc de Guyennes (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 664). Among the attributed manuscripts, well over half are Books of Hours, many of them richly illuminated. The artist’s elegant style includes graceful figures softly modeled and posed with a Gothic sway, finely tessellated backgrounds, and a rich palette with jewel-like colors, bright orange, vibrant red, light pink, deep blue, and solid black. Spatial settings held little interest for him. François Avril considered him “one of the three most visible protagonists at the beginning of the fifteenth century” and in his praise for him, Millard Meiss ranked him second only to the Limbourg Brothers among the illuminators of the “golden age” of Parisian manuscript production.