Book of Hours of Étienne Chevalier (France)

• Illuminated by Jean Fouquet for Étienne Chevalier, treasurer to King Charles VII. A profoundly personal devotional manuscript featuring a striking blend of classical architecture, Renaissance perspective, and an iconic depiction of the Virgin based on Agnès Sorel, the king’s mistress.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Book of Hours of Étienne Chevalier emerges not merely as a luxurious commission but as a deeply personal site of aesthetic self-construction and spiritual individuation. According to Foucault, the ethical subject is not formed through juridical rules or institutional confession, but through the aestheticization of existence—an ethical labor in which one sculpts one’s soul like an artist shapes marble. This manuscript is precisely that: a mirror in which Étienne Chevalier shaped a vision of his selfhood between God, state, and passion.

What distinguishes this Book of Hours is the fusion of Renaissance perspective, classical architecture, and living allegory. Its pages do not illustrate generic piety; they narrate Étienne’s intimate care of the self, filtered through Fouquet’s stunning psychological realism. The most famous miniature, the Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, reimagines the Madonna as Agnès Sorel, the king’s mistress, whose beauty and political symbolism entered Étienne’s visual theology. It is an act of ethical transgression recoded as spiritual sublimation—a Foucauldian moment par excellence, where the erotic, the sacred, and the sovereign are no longer clearly separated.

This manuscript thus becomes a technology of the self, structured not by sin but by aesthetic tension: eroticism and holiness, wealth and humility, public duty and private longing. Fouquet’s illuminations are not simply religious tableaux; they are allegories of ethical self-invention, where every detail—architectural framing, drapery, gesture—enacts the stylization of Étienne’s soul. In Foucauldian terms, the Book does not discipline Étienne—it offers him an aesthetic mode to practice ethical selfhood, mediated through sacred narrative and erotic longing.

The architectural settings of the miniatures—domes, vaults, oculi—evoke Roman Stoic grandeur, anchoring Étienne’s private meditation in the ideal of virtuous governance of self and state. This convergence of the political and the spiritual aligns with Foucault’s late analysis of how care of the self extends into the political aesthetics of life—how one governs others by first governing oneself.