Word: duking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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 Très 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...
...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...