9
Cultural Politics in Late Medieval France: Court Society and the Limbourg Brothers's "Très Riches Heures"
[essay written in 1990 compressing a book project]
Robert Baldwin, Connecticut College
LEFT-RIGHT In contrast to traditional scholarship dwelling on the Limbourg Brothers's artistic innovations, supposedly neutral description and sympathetic treatment of peasants, the social history of their calendar cycle developed here explores the ways in which their choices helped construct a reassuring feudal mythology of nature and social hierarchy for French courtly elites. Today, I shall show how the supposedly timeless orders of Nature, her seasons, and her ostensibly natural hierarchies were marshaled to reinforce, disguise, and naturalize traditional forms of power. We shall also see that power's new anxiety and uncertainty at a time of French royal insanity and treachery, civil war, religious schism, social insurrection, and foreign invasion. In this sense, the Très Riches Heures shows less a programmatic display of fixed power than an artistically innovative negotiation with the new vulnerability of feudal power in the late medieval city.
By surrounding their royal patron in January with a giant, flaming, circular fire screen echoing the fiery emblems on his clothes and the ruling sun-God above, and by modeling their Apollo on a medallion of the triumphal emperor Heraclius, the Limbourg brothers did more than solarize rulers and imperialize deities (Fig. 1). Medieval political theory, romance, and astrology had long since transformed sovereigns into images of gods and deities into feudal lords. New here was a complex, late medieval agenda naturalizing feudalism and feudalizing nature. The former is clear enough in the hierarchical qualities of the Limbourgs's naturalism (Figs. 2-3) which LEFT-RIGHT carefully distinguished between nobly clothed courtiers and basely naked peasants, LEFT-RIGHT between elegant, elongated bodies and lumpy, animal-like forms, between elevated positions on horseback and in castles - the viewpoint given by these painted perspectives to the real courtly viewer - RIGHT and the lowly positions and earth-bound postures of the peasantry, between refined leisure devoted to the arts of jousting, banqueting, music, falconry, courtly love, and art itself, and the vulgar necessities of a material struggle to survive, between a world of mind and of body, LEFT-RIGHT between a culture liberating aristocrats from the oppressive rule of the seasons by banishing winter scarcity, cold, and harshness with cornucopias of food, warmth, and even an eternal tapestried greenery (Fig. 1), and a lower nature enslaving lesser creatures to its material demands. In this sense, the Limbourgs's new celebration of nature was profoundly ambiguous and served ultimately to help construct a superior world of aristocratic artifice ruling over the natural order, a world like the formal garden in April (Fig. 4).
Take the imperial Apollo in January (Fig. 1). RIGHT In so far as this deity played on a medallion owned by the Duke of Berry himself, the Limbourgs did more than flatter the duke politically. They also praised his dominion over the world of art, not just as a great collector but also as a refined connoisseur whose knowledge and powers of discrimination allowed him to recognize in one prized work of art subtle political allusions to another. Apollo might rule over the cosmos but it was the duke's intelligence which ruled over the page, the book, and the larger culture embodied in its pages. The duke's divine mind placed Apollo in his proper place and patronized artists clever enough to recognize and give new visual form to such hierarchies. If French court poets like Guillaume da Machaut routinely credited the royal minds of their patrons for the intelligence of their poetry, RIGHT French painters revealed the hidden, shaping presence of royal minds in their many dedication miniatures where diminutive authors knelt humbly to present flattering books to grandly enthroned, God-like patrons (Fig. 5). Such flattery was particularly important in painting private books of hours subject to the patron's regular close scrutiny. By painting a celestial God overseeing King David who in turn oversees two artisans building a grand palace, the Limbourg Brothers created an explicit analogy to these traditional dedication miniatures (Fig. 6). Here the Duke of Berry could admire the rule of his own god-like mind over the lofty world of architecture, and by implication, over the Limbourgs' own, sumptuous craftmanship. Beyond its many such clever, allegorical and compositional inventions, the Très Riches Heures' royal wealth, noble intelligence, and frequent references to the duke's patronage of architecture, tapestry, music (Fig. 7), literature, and painting, served to confirm in the very act of reading the duke's own magnificence, virtue, and high-mindedness as France's greatest patron.
Needless to say, the culture and consciousness of such books, like the precious objects themselves, RIGHT were literally worlds away from the peasant and incorporated the latter in part to confirm the magnitude and sacred eternity of that distance. In this larger sense, the Limbourgs's peasant imagery was less a sympathetic look into rural life than a philosophically and aesthetically complex sign in a sophisticated courtly allegory - at once social, political, and intellectual - of feudal rule. Here it helps to recognize the feudal meaning of allegory itself: abstract, learned, static, and beyond the comprehension of boors as Christine de Pizan noted: "faire and wise woordis shoulde not be tolde to rude & ignorant peopil, they which can not vndirstonde theim." Such comments help us see the Limbourgs's naturalism as another kind of complex, esoteric courtly language profoundly structured by the values of its très riches spectateurs, a pictorial language analogous in some ways to that of heraldic shields, personal badges and devices.
Of course, many contemporary, lesser voices responded differently to the display of late medieval court culture: the voices of reformist clerics, rebellious Parisian burghers and tradesmen who suffered under the taxes of the French court, and presumably peasants. Encouraged by the seditious Duke of Burgundy, Parisian burghers and preachers even participated in large religious processions to Notre Dame organized for the sole purpose of condemning the Duke of Berry and other members of his faction. Such hostility also drew on a late medieval clerical critique of court culture as an expression of impious greed and waste in a world of appalling poverty and economic violence. Seen from this perspective, the Très Riches Heures was just another useless "curious work" of art on which the nobility squandered other people's money. To cite one sermon, one saw here how the modern nobleman had "eaten and drunk and clothed himself out of the labours of the poor". One saw
"the kings, earls, and other lords of estates, who lived with pride and with great circumstance ... who kept keep many hounds and a numerous and evil retinue, who possessed great palaces ... and broad lands with large rents, who nourished their own bodies in ... the pleasures of gluttony, who ruled their subjects harshly and cruelly to obtain the aforesaid luxuries, and fleeced them."
RIGHT So too, its pageantry showed how "the tournament of the rich is the torment of the poor". RIGHT Its falconry made visible a courtly pride, plundering, and rapacious lust. RIGHT And its lofty architecture suggested the anti-courtly proverb of the fool in high places.
Rather than existing in some discrete realm separate from such critical voices, court culture and works such as the Très Riches Heures engaged in a complex dialogue with that criticism. At times, court culture responded to its detractors by reaffirming its own traditions. At other times, such attacks were themselves absorbed into court culture and defused. In short, we should read the manuscript's assertion of the "timeless", "natural" superiority of court life against the perpetual late medieval threat of social upheaval, antagonism, and rivalry from below. There was peasant revolt still fresh in the collective noble memory since the uprising of the Jacquerie (1358) when thousands of peasants sacked fortified houses across Northern France and were slaughtered in return. More pressing, contemporary threats materialize once we look beyond the specious verisimilitude of the Limbourgs's Months, beyond their ostensible portraits of individuals, buildings, and clothes to the way the larger dichotomies of high and low, noble and base worked to describe and contain all overly ambitious lower groups. In part, "unnatural" ambition stretched from the highest, royal circles of the treasonous John the Fearless and his followers down to the lowest brigands terrorizing the Parisian countryside. At a time of royal insanity and betrayal, civil war, foreign invasion, urban uprising, and schism, all the estates seemed overtaken by disruption and chaos. As one Parisian burgher complained in 1413, "Fortune kept chopping and changing in this kingdom, and no one, gently born or otherwise, could tell what rank was best - the great all hated each other, the middle classes were burdened with taxation, the very poor could not earn a living".
No violation of the natural orders was more disturbing to courtly viewers during the painting of the Très Riches Heures (1413-16) than the presumption of Parisian burghers and trades people. The new urban merchant class offended on many levels. Ignoring new sumptuary laws, they imitated and often surpassed the nobility in feasts, clothing, education, festivals, musical ensembles, and grandiose townhouses. They even presumed to commission illuminated heures as Charles V's poet, Eustache Deschamps, had noted satirically in the late fourteenth-century.
RIGHT On the level of ideology, the new, educated, urban class also lay claim to an inner nobility beyond blood and class. Bourgeois presumption was only worsened by the Capetian policy of appointing burghers to important administrative positions, by the poverty of many aristocrats and the financial and commercial obligations of the French court to urban bankers and merchants. The Italian financier, Dino Rapondi even became the factotum of Philip the Bold. At times, the new social group threatened the crown directly by rioting violently against royal taxation - the biggest revolt spread through Paris and other French cities in 1382 - and by siding against Charles VI and the Duke of Berry in the civil war of 1410-1413. Encouraged by John the Fearless and wealthy meat merchants, mobs of trades people took over Paris in April and May, 1413, arresting the queen's brother, seizing the Dauphin, and ransacking various royal homes including the dauphin's residence and two of the Duke of Berry's grand palaces. When John the Fearless proved unable to control the mobs and fled in late 1413, many of the rebellious trades people and burghers were themselves massacred by royal troops or arrested and condemned by royal courts. In her The Book of Peace, completed after the return of royal power and presented to the Duke of Berry significantly on New Year's Day, 1414, Christine de Pizan ridiculed the unnatural political pretensions of these lesser people.
"What mischance had instructed an artisan, who all his life had done only his work ... and had certainly never frequented legists or lawyers to learn about law and justice, nor had ever experienced honor or known what is good sense, or learned to speak logically with good and evident proof, nor learned any of the things needed to carry on government. And such a fool as this ... [who] knows how to behave himself only in a tavern, now wants to govern others.
LEFT-RIGHT Since the Très Riches Heures was painted immediately after this bloody uprising and in the midst of a larger civil war, it is not surprising to find references to contemporary upheaval in its Biblical illuminations. Such comparisons between scripture and contemporary politics were deeply rooted in medieval habits of thinking by analogy; indeed, French writers were incapable of discussing the civil war and the trades people's revolt without frequent analogues to sacred history. By illustrating Psalm 101 where King David prays for divine retribution against troops attacking Jerusalem, the Limbourgs suggested the threat of English and Burgundian troops and the siege against Charles VI by trades people in 1413. LEFT RIGHT By introducing a troop of angels dressed as French soldiers into their Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Limbourgs suggested the royal retribution following the trades people's uprising (Figs. 8A, 8B). The empty thrones here also suggest the treasonous revolt of John the Fearless and the ruin of civil war. LEFT-RIGHT Divine vengeance against all lesser pretenders was also celebrated in the Limbourgs's Messiah's Dominions with its bloody corpses heaped in the foreground (Fig. 9) and in the St John on Patmos (Fig. 10A). Just as Christine de Pisan contrasted unified heavenly rule with contemporary royal division, the Limbourgs placed Christ at the top of a royal court of twenty-four Biblical elders - here shown as kings. The illumination's contemporary political resonance expands when we remember this is the Apocalyptic Christ, a Christ victorious over Satanic pretenders to the heavenly throne, the supreme judge sitting over an imaginary yet distinctly French fortified city whose outskirts display three bodies hanging on gallows or impaled and broken on wheels (Fig. 10B). Such methods of execution were reserved for lower class transgressors. As was traditional, divine and royal justice mingled easily in this illumination, reinforcing each other.
Set against recent events in Paris, the agricultural tranquility of the Limbourg Months were nostalgic fictions of a peaceful, prosperous earlier Golden Age (Fig. 11). In reality, the French countryside was devastated, as lamented by Alain Chartier in 1422. "in many places the land could be seen naked, the seeds and trees uprooted, cast aside and hanging in shreds so that no order could be seen there nor any harvest hoped for." Against this backdrop, we can see how the Très Riches Heures either omitted violence altogether, sublimated it to the noble conflict of jousting, hunting, and falconry, or displaced it to Biblical scenes of divine wrath. Real violence and class conflict were much too uncouth, not to mention subversive, for the cosmic order of the duke's calendar and the ideal governance, the Golden Age brought by his rule.