Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is undoubtedly the most famous of all works of book illustration. This splendid, lavishly embellished manuscript  was produced in the early fifteenth century by the Limbourg brothers for the wealthiest and most knowledgeable collector of the times, Jean de Berry, the son, brother and uncle of three Kings of France (John II ‘the Good’, Charles V and Charles VI).

Embellishments of the first order

On each page of this marvellous manuscript we find an abundance of embellishments of all kinds. The 208 folios (416 pages) include more than 3,000 gilded initials and as many as 130 raised silver and gold illuminations, including those of the world-famous Calendar.

The brothers from Flanders

The stunningly beautiful illustrations are the work of the brothers, Herman, Paul and Jean de Limbourg, born in Nijmegen in the late fourteenth century. They died practically together, between the autumn of 1415 and the spring of 1416. The three enormously talented brothers produced some of the most impressive and valuable illuminated codices of the period of the decline of the Gothic mode and of the dawning of Renaissance art.  The codex, unfinished when the brothers died, was terminated in about 1485, when Charles I (Duke of Savoy) commissioned the illuminator, Jean Colombe, to complete the work.