Hours of Mary of Burgundy (Flanders)

• Commissioned for Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the Bold, this Book of Hours is considered one of the crowning achievements of Flemish manuscript illumination. It is celebrated for its hyperrealism, masterful use of trompe l’oeil, and deeply introspective spiritual tone.

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

The Hours of Mary of Burgundy is not merely a devotional object—it is an exquisite visual machine for ethical individuation, a sacred theatre of the gaze in which subjectivity is not imposed but self-enchanted. Through Foucault’s eyes, it reveals itself as a paradigm of aesthetic self-governance: a space in which the user—like Mary—does not passively receive the divine, but actively configures her soul through looking, contemplation, and interpretive participation.

The manuscript’s most iconic miniature—a woman reading a Book of Hours in a windowed chamber while, beyond the stained glass, the Virgin appears in a heavenly scene—serves as the central metaphor for this aesthetic of existence. The scene invites us to contemplate Foucault’s idea that the care of the self is not solipsistic: it is a practice of spiritual hospitality extended toward an imagined Other. In gazing at the Virgin through illusionistic layers of space and color, Mary gazes also at herself—not in narcissism, but in mirrored transformation.

Flemish realism here becomes a technology of the self, seducing the viewer into visual exercises of ethical memory and emotional refinement. The borders of each page, which appear to burst with flowers, insects, pearls, and gothic tracery, are not decoration—they are pedagogical triggers, small ecological invitations to be present, to read the natural as symbolic, to discover truth in detail, as Foucault would say.

This manuscript participates in what Foucault describes as a mode of subjectivity distinct from juridical subjection. There are no confessions here, no moralistic dictations—only a slow unfolding of inward space, where the boundaries of prayer, perception, and pleasure dissolve. In this world, illusion is the path to truth; trompe l’oeil is not deception, but an ethical provocation. How do you know what is sacred unless you learn to see beyond surfaces?

For Mary of Burgundy, royal heir and politically constrained subject, this Book of Hours was likely not only a religious guide but a coded space of personal sovereignty. In Foucault’s terms, it is a manuscript of spiritual resistance through form—where one’s soul is crafted through beauty, attention, and layered temporality.