Art: Books of the Centuries

Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this week took the wrappings off a handsome Christmas gift to itself: two superbly hand-illuminated medieval Books of Hours, almost as fresh as the day they were painted, which experts value together at $250,000. One, made to order sometime before 1413 for Jean, Duke of Berry and Prince of France, includes 94 full-page illustrations which the Met terms “a whole gallery of medieval paintings.” The other, a minute volume (2⅜ in. by 3½ in.), was made to fit a queen’s hand, probably that of Jeanne d’Evreux, third wife of France’s Charles IV.

Both prayer books were bought from Baron Maurice de Rothschild’s collection in 1954 by James J. Rorimer, then curator of The Cloisters, a Met outpost. For Medievalist Rorimer the two books represented “an extraordinary opportunity for supplementing The Cloister’s collections.” Rorimer, now the Met’s director, used income from a $10 million gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to purchase the books, waited until this year’s Christmas season to announce the acquisition.

While the Met can show each of its treasured volumes only two pages at a time, museumgoers are likely to be both tantalized and delighted by what they see. The Duke of Berry’s Belles Heures, illustrated by his personal painters, the three Limbourg brothers, breathes the freshness of morning. Embossed with gold, it sparkles with flower-bouquet hues, including the exquisite borage-blossom blue, a pigment so precious that the duke listed two pots of it among his treasures. The queen’s handbook was meant to delight as well as instruct. The Nativity (see cut) introduces the text for sunrise prayers, but just in case courtly heads should begin to nod, Artist Jean Pucelle, a Paris illuminator so famed that even Dante sang his praise, spiced it with a troupe of acrobats and a monster king tempting a dog with a colossal jawbone.