Tiny pages, grand scale

It takes piles of money and power to commission projects destined to become pinnacles of art history. Sometimes it also takes a bit of royal boredom.

Just listen to Timothy B. Husband, curator of the Cloisters Collection of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s providing some background on “The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry,” an exhibition opening Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Jean de France, duc de Berry, was son, brother and uncle of successive kings of France. As prince of the realm, he was in a position to commission almost anything he wanted,” Husband says of an extravagantly ambitious art patron who lived from 1340 to 1416. “He began by collecting palaces and chateaux, building chapels and that sort of thing. After he had gone through about 17 of those, he moved on to other works of art.”

As ruler of Auvergne and Berry, a historical area in central France, the duke controlled a huge portion of the country during the middle period of the Hundred Years’ War. With exacting tastes, he hired the finest artists and made sure they had the best materials to create tapestries, sculptures and gemstone-studded gold objects that Husband calls “lavish displays of excessive consumption.” But he is probably better known for the passion that seized him at about 40 years of age: luxury manuscripts -- particularly illuminated personal prayer books known as Books of Hours.

The bestsellers of the Middle Ages, Books of Hours were popular because they allowed believers to establish an immediate relationship with God without intercession of the clergy. Another attraction was that the books could be customized to suit the tastes and pocketbooks of their owners.

The duke was perpetually in debt, but that didn’t prevent him from funding two of the most celebrated Books of Hours made in the late medieval period. One of them, the “Tres Riches Heures,” is hidden away in the Musee Conde at the Chateau of Chantilly, northeast of Paris, where hardly anyone can see it. The other manuscript, the “Belles Heures,” landed in the Met’s collection in 1954.

Thanks to the recent publication of a facsimile edition of the “Belles Heures” and related conservation work, which required disassembling the sumptuously illustrated volume, 180 pages -- measuring 9 3/8 by 6 11/16 inches and containing 82 of the 172 miniatures -- are traveling to Los Angeles. A related exhibition will appear at the New York museum next fall. For the first time, the public will come as close as possible to turning the pages of an astonishing compendium of paintings by three young Franco-Netherlandish brothers, Paul, Herman and Jean de Limbourg.

Designed to wow

Like all bound manuscripts, the “Belles Heures” is usually displayed as an open book with two pages visible at any one time. At the Getty, the show will occupy a pair of manuscript galleries. Nine folios -- large sheets folded into two leaves, or four pages, with illuminations on both sides -- will be displayed on pedestals so that visitors can see how the manuscript was constructed. The rest of the leaves will be framed and hung on walls.

Jeffrey Hamburger, an authority on medieval devotional art who teaches art history at Harvard University, calls the exhibitions a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “We live in an age of virtual reproductions, facsimiles, simulacra of all kinds. . . . but they are no substitute for the original,” he says. “To be able to see one of the great masterpieces of late-medieval manuscript art unbound is extraordinary.” The illuminations, he says, are “exquisite, elegant, elaborate, virtuosic. Each page is designed to knock your socks off. This is a prayer book, but it’s also a miniature museum, usually bound between two covers.”

Husband puts it this way in a book accompanying the exhibitions: “Here, within one volume, are more brilliantly preserved paintings from the first decade of the 15th century created north of the Alps than can be found collectively on the walls of all the major museums in Europe and North America. And they are paintings not by ordinary artists, but by the most prodigiously gifted of their time.”

In the “Belles Heures,” the brothers worked in ink, tempera and gold leaf on sheets of animal skin, painting scenes of tenderness and violence in meticulous detail. A miniature called “The Procession of the Flagellants” looks almost modern in its orderly depiction of men in white robes, hooded or stripped to the waist, engaged in a bloody ceremony intended to solicit saintly protection. In sharp contrast, “Saint Nicholas Saves Travelers at Sea” portrays a boatload of desperate men roiling in a tempest of waves.

“Saint George and the Dragon” is a heroic rendition of a popular theme, with the beast, already impaled by a broken lance, awaiting death by the saint’s sword. In “Descent From the Cross,” a naturalistic Christ slumps into the arms of four figures who lower him to the ground.

“The Limbourg brothers clearly were extraordinary prodigies,” Husband says. Born into an artistic family in what is now Holland, they immigrated to France in about 1400 and within a couple of years went to work on an illustrated Bible for the duke of Berry’s younger brother, the duke of Burgundy. “At his death, in 1404, the duke of Berry snatched them up,” the curator says. “When he hired them, the oldest one couldn’t have been more than 15. The youngest was around 12 or 13.”

For the duke’s pleasure

The youthful artists and their elderly employer died in 1416, probably of the plague, before the “Tres Riches Heures” was completed. The “Belles Heures,” in process from about 1405 to late 1408 or early 1409, is their only finished manuscript. Conceived as a relatively ordinary Book of Hours, containing a calendar of feast days and prayers to be recited at specific occasions and times of day, it evolved into something special, distinguished by seven additional sections.

“Beyond the extraordinary richness and unparalleled quality of the illuminations, what makes the manuscript extremely unusual is that picture book cycles were added,” Husband says. “They were illuminated in gatherings of three to 12 pages that have absolutely nothing to do with the Book of Hours, for the visual delectation of the duke. I think he understood that he had artists of incomparable talent and really wanted to support them. The picture cycles became laboratories for the brothers to develop their considerable gifts in the art of narrative illustration.”

The duke collected artists as well as art, Hamburger says, and the Limbourgs were one of his prize acquisitions. Art historians praise the variety of their compositions, their rich palette and the emotional charge of their work, as well as their drawing and painting skill. Thomas Kren, the Getty’s senior curator of manuscripts, who selected illuminations to show the quality and range of the art, points out a refinement and subtlety not found in earlier painting. The Limbourgs also had a more advanced sense of anatomy than their predecessors, he says. “Some of the figures are not just nudes, they are sexy.”

In Hamburger’s view, the pictures in the “Belles Heures” “impress on account of their naturalism, but at the same time, they are remarkably artificial. The artists were trained as goldsmiths. In many respects, the bright colors and light are reminiscent of the jewelry and enamel work that the duke also prized very highly.”

In 1417, the year after the duke died, Yolande of Aragon, the duchess of Anjou, purchased the manuscript. It is thought to have remained in Anjou for several decades, but there is no record of it until 1879, when it appeared in the possession of Pierre-Gabriel Bourlier, baron of Ailly. A few years later, it passed into the collection of Edmond James de Rothschild in Paris. At his death, in 1934, the “Belles Heures” went to his son, Maurice de Rothschild, who fled Paris in 1940, after the Nazis occupied the city.

Many of Maurice de Rothschild’s manuscripts were confiscated by the Nazis and later returned, but the “Belles Heures” apparently was kept safely in hiding. In 1954, it went on the market in New York with another valuable Rothschild manuscript, the “Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux” by Jean Pucelle. They were quietly offered to the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, a treasure house of illuminated manuscripts, but refused for lack of funds. Harvard’s Houghton Library and a private collector were also approached, without success. The Met, fourth in line because it had not previously collected medieval manuscripts, bought them for $300,000. That’s the equivalent of about $2.4 million today and, in Husband’s words, “one of the most fortuitous acquisitions of medieval art on record.”

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Suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com

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‘The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles.

When: Tuesday through Feb. 8.

10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturdays.

Price: Free.

Contact: (310) 440-7300 or www.getty.edu