Very Rich Hours in Chantilly

It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months.

"Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly.

It's such a small illustration -- just a few inches square -- but the detail and the colour are astonishing. As you lean closer to the glass case housing the precious page at eye level, you can't miss the Duke's bulbous nose -- that's him in the blue, with the fur hat -- as well as the dishes on the table and above all the patterns and folds of the sumptuous clothing and headgear. Particularly snazzy are the hose worn by one of the figures with his back to us in front of the table -- one leg light green, the other white with dots. And at the rear, a tapestry with Trojan warriors (in contemporary armour) on horseback, who also seem to be coming to the feast.

The image of the Duke, as painted by the Limbourg brothers, who created this fabulous page, seems to be very true to life, or at least to death; one of the notable early exhibits in the show is the effigy of the Duke from the Cathedral in Bourges, a fitting memorial to a man who was the son, brother and uncle of Kings of France. It was created by Jean de Cambrai from a commission given in the Duke's lifetime, and you marvel at the likeness, even if the nose has taken a few knocks over the years. The Duke wears ermine, of course, and at his feet, rather than the dog you so often see in these monuments, there's a very charming bear. There's a suggestion the Duke might have kept a bear as a pet. Well, he could afford it.

There are some other fantastic sculptures by Jean de Cambrai here, by the way, including a Virgin and Child; the marble pleats and folds are something to behold.

This show is a tale of two inordinately wealthy dukes centuries apart, both of them avid bibliophiles and collectors of art. Jean, the Duke of Berry, didn't just own the Très Riches Heures; he had 18 handwritten and illustrated Books of Hours, six of which he personally commissioned and which have been reunited in Chantilly for the first time since he died in 1416. The second nobleman is Henri, Duke of Aumale, also a son of a French King, who bought the Très Riches Heures in Genoa in 1855 for 18,000 francs, recognising it as a long-disappeared masterpiece and later making it the centre of his collection in his reconstructed château at Chantilly.

But the exhibition is, naturally, also a story of artists, particularly the three brothers from Nijmegen -- Jean, Herman and Paul Limbourg -- who produced perhaps the most memorable paintings in the book, though they weren't the only illustrators, even of the 12 months. For February, they created one of the first snow-covered landscapes in Western art, one capturing the hard life of the peasantry rather than the luxury of the ducal court.

Under that leaden grey sky, labourers are at work, sheep are safely in their pen (though there's a hole in the roof), and the crows pick at grains on the ground. Inside the cottage on the left, washing is hung up to dry, and the three people inside are warming themselves in front of the fire. Got to get some warmth to your vital parts....

February seems to be the cruellest month in this Book of Hours. April, on the other hand, is full of the promise of spring. In sumptuous costumes, the Duke's daughter, Marie, and Jean de Bourbon appear to be exchanging rings.

Being the highlight of the show, these calendar illustrations come close to the end of your tour, which is full of superb loans that help you understand the context in which these works were created. There are manuscripts aplenty, jewels too, but also paintings. This exquisite portrait, from Washington, by a Franco-Flemish artist whose name we don't know was created at much the same period as the Limbourg brothers were making that betrothal scene, and you can recognise the affinities, particularly in costume.

And if you think that reminds you of the Italian Renaissance -- say the Portrait of a Young Woman by Antonio or Piero del Pollaiuolo -- you wouldn't be wrong, but the Italians got there half a century later.

You really can't rush round the months -- they reward close scrutiny so you may find yourself having to wait your turn to get right in front of them. Consisting of a total of 206 leaves of very fine-quality parchment, 30 cm in height by 21.5 cm in width, the manuscript contains 66 large miniatures and 65 small. The sheets including the months have been taken out of their bindings and are displayed in double-sided cases. Not all of them were made by the Limbourg brothers; November was painted by Jean Colombe decades later, because the book was a work in progress long after the Duke of Berry's death.

Yes, November: Winter is coming so you need to get those hogs ready for the feasts by fattening them up, and what do pigs love? Acorns. A well-aimed stick, as wielded by the swineherd on the left, will bring down more acorns from the trees. Those two pigs' rear ends on the right steal the scene.

And to end the year, a hunt. The turrets of the Château de Vincennes tower above the forest and suggest where the dead game will be feasted on. The hunt attendant on the left looks exhausted; it must have been a long chase.

As you go round this show, you can't help but marvel at the sumptuousness, the fine detail, the artistry, the craftsmanship, the sheer imagination that went into these works of art that, while treasured, will perhaps hardly ever have been taken out to be admired. Just consider the hours upon hours of effort that must have gone into this, the marginal decoration of the page of another Book of Hours, on loan from New York. Simply mind-boggling.

If you can get to Chantilly to see this show, do so. You're very unlikely to get the chance again.

Practicalities

Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is on at the Château de Chantilly until October 5. It's open daily except Tuesdays from 1000 to 1800. Allow yourself plenty of time; we took three hours to go round the exhibition. Note that while the main overview wall captions are in French and English, the labels on individual exhibits are only in French; your mobile phone is very useful for translations.

Full-price tickets to the exhibition (and the park surrounding the Château) cost 12 euros, but if you're making the trip all the way to Chantilly you'll almost certainly want to pay 21 euros for a day ticket that also takes you inside the Château to see the art treasures of the Musée Condé assembled by the Duke of Aumale. It's the second-largest collection of historic art in France after that of the Louvre, and these are works you can't otherwise see because they are not loaned out. There are, for example, three Raphaels, as well as this gorgeous portrait of Simonetta Vespucci by Piero di Cosimo.

Chantilly is about 40 kilometres north of Paris. Trains from the Gare du Nord (the same station used by Eurostar trains from London) take only around 30 minutes to get to Chantilly-Gouvieux, though they are somewhat irregular. Follow the signposts to walk to the Château (and the nearby Jeu de Paume exhibition hall) in 20 minutes or so.

Images

January from the Calendar of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1411-85; Feast in the Household of the Duke of Berry, painted by the Limbourg brothers between 1411 and 1416. © RMN-Grand Palais -- Domaine de Chantilly -- Michel Urtado

February from the Calendar of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1411-85; Scene from Peasant Life in the Snow, painted by the Limbourg brothers between 1411 and 1416. © RMN-Grand Palais -- Domaine de Chantilly -- Michel Urtado

April from the Calendar of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1411-85; The Betrothal, painted by the Limbourg brothers between 1411 and 1416. © RMN-Grand Palais -- Domaine de Chantilly -- Michel Urtado

Anonymous Franco-Flemish artist, Portrait of a Lady in Profile, c. 1410-20, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. © National Gallery, Washington

November from the Calendar of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1411-85; The Acorn Harvest, painted by Jean Colombe, c. 1485. © RMN-Grand Palais -- Domaine de Chantilly -- Michel Urtado

December from the Calendar of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1411-85; The Boar Hunt, started by the Limbourg brothers between 1411 and 1416 (Château de Vincennes) and finished by Barthélemy van Eyck after 1440. © RMN-Grand Palais -- Domaine de Chantilly -- Michel Urtado

Barthélémy van Eyck et Enguerrand Quarton, Book of Hours, c. 1440-50, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. © Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522), Simonetta Vespucci, c. 1480, Musée Condé, Chantilly

Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later. Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury . Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while ther...

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