Images of Paradise

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the lessons of history is that art is a better preservative than Formalin, and sweeter smelling, too. Even if the patron is an outright criminal while alive, he seems, after he dies, to take on the noble and decorative character of the works of art that he bought.

One of the most notable examples was a prodigiously wealthy, vain and talented son of a French king, Jean, the Duke of Berry. Jean de Berry was born in 1340, and his patronage of artists changed the whole pattern of late medieval painting. "No patron of his time, and few before or after him, had a comparable effect on the arts," wrote Art Historian Millard Meiss. "Between 1380 and 1400 every great cycle of miniatures in France was commissioned by the Duke of Berry." A superb exhibition of 14th and 15th century French miniature painting, organized by Professor Meiss, is now on view at Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library. Inevitably, its central character is the bottle-nosed prince who made it possible.

Even by aristocratic standards, Jean de Berry's appetite for possessions was extreme. He liked animals; so his menagerie included 50 swans, a wolf, a camel, an ostrich, 1,500 mastiffs, and a number of tame bears which, lurching along in specially designed carts, followed the duke on his frequent moves between ch`ateaux. As with beasts, so with priests: "He maintained in his home," wrote one chronicler, "many chaplains who day and night sang the praises of God and celebrated Mass, and he took care to compliment them whenever the service lasted longer or was more elaborate than usual."

Holy Grail. This conspicuous piety also inspired a large collection of relics, including the mummified corpse of one of the Holy Innocents slain by King Herod, fragments of nails used in the Crucifixion, and the chalice from which Christ supposedly drank at the Last Supper.

The Duke of Berry's belief in a connection between riches and virtue was quite like J. Pierpont Morgan's. He collected nearly every imaginable kind of art object, from panel paintings to antique cameos, from medallions to tapestries, and even a unicorn's horn given to him by the Pope. The result was a triumph of manic connoisseurship--the greatest private collection in Europe.

One part of it was a library of rather more than 300 manuscripts, many illuminated by artists whom the duke retained at court. Today, book illustration is considered a minor art. In medieval France, these tiny images stippled on vellum were considered the most important form of painting.

The duke had an obsession with jewelry and opulent metalwork, and so one might expect all his court art to follow a pattern like that of the Limbourg brothers, who made him what must be the most famous set of miniatures in history--the Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry. A tiny portrait of the duke in the Limbourgs' lesser-known Belles Heures epitomizes their manner: the stiff figure, kneeling devoutly before a sumptuous Gothic ground of red and gold brocade, the flat silhouettes, the sharp, unatmospheric color and light. The painting is conceived as a precious object, wrought with infinite care. So, too, with the work of the Rohan Master, or an anonymous miniaturist's image of Christ enthroned, surrounded by the four evangelists: one imagines the duke hypnotizing himself with the convoluted tendrils of gold leaf that fill the page.

But the duke's taste, though unerring, was also eclectic. At the same time he commissioned the painting of Christ enthroned, around 1415, he also commissioned an Apocalypse from a painter whose style was the very reverse of decoration--plain, and freely, almost aggressively, brushed in. One page shows the woman with a seven-headed dragon from the Book of Revelations, "clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." The design, compressed into a few square inches, has a marvelous sweep--the rockfolds echoing the curve of the dragon's tail and repeated in the pink folds of cloth on the woman's gravid belly.

The duke always tended to encourage the more progressive trends in painting. This, in practice, meant Italian influence. One of the Morgan Library's treasures, a small book of silverpoint sketches on boxwood, probably done by the duke's favorite miniaturist, Jacquemart de Hesdin, is permeated by the Italian trecento--the Madonna stately and subtle as a virgin by Simone Martini. But the greatest impact of Italy was on the artist who was also the greatest of the Berry circle: the Boucicaut Master. An illumination of the Garden of Eden, with Boccaccio sitting reading outside the wall, is full of Italianate elements, from the proportion and drawing of the naked Adam and Eve to the handling of perspective. Yet it is wholly original, and in this exquisite image of paradise, with its angels' wings and apples shining in the lucid air, the trajectory of French miniature painting reached its peak.

Riots. Extortion had paid for it all. "There may well have been contemporaries of Jean de Berry," wrote Millard Meiss, "who maintained that he cared more for animals and for art than for men." They may well have been right. Jean de Berry once gave a hound a life pension, but he taxed his subjects so fiercely that they rioted. Worse, from the aspect of practical politics, he chose the wrong faction in the struggles for the French throne, so his house in Paris was sacked by a furious mob in 1411, and one of his chateaux, stuffed with works of art, was burned.

When he died in 1416, aged 76, the duke's still vast residue of treasure was inventoried, scattered and sold; the carved carnelian spoons and the gold-mounted rock-crystal strawberry holders vanished along with the crowns and crosses. His chateaux, distributed across Burgundy, succumbed to time and wreckers. Only one part of Jean de Berry's stupendous hoard survived in quantity--the library and its miniatures, which nobody wanted: they could not be melted down. Four years later, in 1420, the English occupied Paris. The French court fled, the artists dispersed, and one of the supreme moments in Western art was gone.

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