Category: The Arts

Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 years later and contains 131 full-page illuminations. Now, in a vanishingly rare opportunity, the general public has been invited to step into this world.

Until October, visitors to a special exhibition at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, 55km north of Paris, will be able to view as independent works the 12 monthly calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures, on which much of the fame of this 15th-century prayer book rests. Its importance and influence are contextualised by an exceptional display of some 100 medieval manuscripts, sculptures and paintings loaned from museums and libraries around the world.

…as the renowned scholar Christopher de Hamel, author of the 2016 book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, explains, the Très Riches Heures are so much more than a luxury object. “The staggering originality of the design and composition is overwhelming,” he says. “The full-page calendar miniatures were the first ever made. It marks the very first moment when the Renaissance touched northern Europe.

Here is the full story.  This is very likely the best and most important artistic exhibit in the world right now.  It is only the third time (ever) the pages of the book have been on display for the public.  In the exhibit more broadly, it is remarkable how many of the best works were created in the first decade of the fifteenth century.

All three of the brothers died before the age of thirty, possibly because of the plague.

Chantilly is about an hour north of Paris, and it is a pleasant but fairly extreme town.  Think of it as a French version of Middleburg, VA?  Or perhaps parts of Sonoma?  It is their version of horse country, with non-spicy food to boot.  The accompanying castle, by the way, also is interesting and has some wonderful art works, including by Poussin, Watteau, and Greuze.  The decor and trappings give you a sense of what eighteenth century French Enlightenment nobles might have considered to be beautiful.

A major goal of this trip has been to get a better handle on the Western European medieval world, and visiting this exhibit has been a big and very successful part of that.

Recently I wrote about my quest to track down Mexican amate (bark paper) painter Juan Camilo Ayala, but there is another part to the early story, namely looking for his brother Marcial Camilo Ayala, also a painter.

Marcial no longer lived in Oapan, as he found village life intolerable.  So he settled in Taxco (later Cuernavaca), and it was Juan Camilo who told me that when I showed up at his house in Oapan.  Originally I was hoping to meet both brothers on that first trip.

When I arrived in Taxco on my next Mexico trip, I had the strategy of asking all tradionally-clothed women in the city center “do you know Marcial Camilo Ayala?”  Far from being a needle in the haystack strategy, this yielded results within seconds.  All of a sudden I was chatting with Marcial’s youngest daughter, Oliva.  She in turn brought me down a steep cobblestone street to see Marcial, who was painting in a dark back room in Taxco.  It all felt rather hopeless, at least at first.

Marcial and Juan were quite different.  Marcial is by far the most intellectual person from Oapan, as he could speak at high levels about Picasso and Rousseau, Zapata and land reform, Nahuatl poetry, and the late string quartets of Beethoven (alas he passed away almost ten years ago).  Juan cannot meaningfully read or write, but he is a corn farmer who knows everything about the rain.  Marcial typically is considered the strongest painter from Oapan, and multiple times he had traveled abroad for exhibits of his work.

I now had two reasons to go to the region, namely Juan and Marcial.  And so I became patrons of them both, and now have dozens of works from each of them, including some very large six foot by eight foot creations.  I kept on returning to Guerrero, and would spend some time in Oapan with Juan and his family, and some time with Marcial, either in Taxco or Cuernavaca, typically talking about ideas and art.  I finally started to learn proper Spanish from all the required back and forth.

In my time in Oapan I enjoyed the stars at night, the fiestas and processions, the long hours sitting around talking and joking with Juan’s family, and of course the food.  The musty blue corn tortillas are to die for.  If you want some fresh fish, great, but they have to go down to the river and catch it for you.  The bean tamales and moles with pepitas are incredible.  I once commissioned a barbecue meal, $80 for a full goat, cooked underground overnight, as from prehispanic barbeque traditions.  Most meals did not involve meat, however, other than the staple of eggs.

Yet life in Oapan is not easy, not even for the visitor.  There was no flush toilet or shower.  The “bed” was a hard slab, and the evening temperatures inside the room exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  The roosters crow at 4 a.m., and then everyone is awake.  You can leave, but within the Oapan of that time, dollars could not buy you conveniences.  There is an ever-present risk of dengue and sometimes malaria as well.

I got to know the four main amate painting villages (Ameyaltepec, Xalitla, and Maxela are the others), and met virtually all the living amate painters of note.  I visited the renowned Alfonso Lorenzo Santos, both chained to the wall in his home in Ameyaltepec and also in the mental hospital in Cuernavaca.  (Alfonso was later profiled in The Wall Street Journal, and for that journalist, Bob Davis, I served as Mexico guide and translator.)  Occasionally, when looking for new amates, I had to throw rocks at the wild dogs to make my way to the homes on the edge of town.

Over the course of about a dozen years of visits, I built up what is the world’s largest and I would say best amate collection, with hundreds of quite distinct works.  I also managed to buy an important early private collection, from the 1980s, with more than two hundred paintings.  For years I tracked all the amate painting listings on eBay, snagging many a bargain.  Later I served as (unpaid) amate painting consultant to the Smithsonian, when they set up the American Indian museum now on the mall.  I am pleased that the assemblage of these works is preserving a significant cultural episode and tradition in Mexican history.

I also collected a good deal of village ceramics, still done with red clay using pre-conquest methods, noting that not all of them made it home intact.  The Spanish word “burbuja” — bubble wrap — remains prominent in my mind and vocabulary.  Ideally, I would like to do a major “air lift” of traditional pottery out of Oapan, but these days the drug gangs are a major obstacle.

Buying art works from Juan and Marcial also evolved into charity, and I developed my thoughts on direct cash transfers.  I wrote those up on MR long ago, and I am pleased to report they had some influence in inspiring the non-profit Give Directly.

Eventually I wrote a whole book on the economy and polity of Oapan, and on the lives of the amate painters.  It was published with the University of Michigan Press under the title Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters.  It has sold the least well of any of my books, by far, but it is one of my favorites and it is quite unlike all the others.

Over the years, there was one amate painter whose works I never tracked down, namely Jesus Corpos Aliberto.  Marcial had told me he heard a rumor that Jesus Corpos was living in a dumpy hotel in the middle of Mexico City, Hotel Buenos Aires.  I found my way to the hotel, and yes Jesus was there with a big stack of brilliant amates he was looking to sell.  They let him stay there in a smelly back room.  Sadly he was insane, and would sell the amates only for millions of pesos.  During yet my next trip to Mexico City, I returned but the hotel was gone altogether, eliminated by gentrification.  I had no remaining links to Corpos.  At that point, and following the passing of Marcial, and the aging of the other main amate painters, that part of my life largely was over.  And so my story with amate painting ends with the same basic obstacle it started with: a stubborn refusing to sell me something, thwarted markets in everything.