Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (France)

The most celebrated illuminated Book of Hours of the Late Middle Ages, created by the Limbourg brothers for the Duke of Berry. It features intricate calendar scenes, devotional prayers, and celestial imagery in the International Gothic style.

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

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is a work of devotional brilliance, yet under Foucault’s lens, it becomes more than a pious object—it is a technology of ethical self-stylization operating through cosmic alignment, aristocratic identity, and aestheticized temporality. This manuscript reveals how power, time, and selfhood are rendered in harmonious interplay through a calendar of sacred and profane life.

Foucault’s concept of the care of the self reveals that this Book of Hours functions as a structured daily exercise in cultivating the soul—not through doctrine or confession, but through visual participation in ordered rituals. Each calendar miniature is a mirror of the Duke’s world: a cosmos in which labor, celebration, and devotion cycle through the year with divine symmetry. To view it is not only to observe time but to enter time as a governed experience—ordered, gilded, and cosmically endorsed.

The prayers and liturgical hours guide the user not toward a confessional subjectivity, but a ritualized self, one trained through repetition and contemplation to align with divine rhythms. The user of this book becomes a practitioner of ethical regularity—Foucault’s hallmark of ancient ethics as self-discipline rather than law-bound morality.

Moreover, the manuscript's luxurious imagery—châteaux, peasants, zodiac signs—exposes the entanglement of aesthetic representation and aristocratic biopolitics. The Duke’s world is not just celebrated, but constructed visually through the cycles of nature and the heavens. Here, as Foucault posits, power is not oppressive but productive, shaping not only behavior but perception and identity.

The inclusion of peasants within such a rarefied book is significant. They labor and feast in a cycle that supports and affirms the Duke’s order. Their visibility does not equal empowerment; rather, they are enframed within a cosmology that renders class hierarchy natural and divinely cyclical.

Thus, the Très Riches Heures is both an instrument of ethical devotion and a visual regime of sovereign aesthetics. It is where celestial order, bodily time, and class relations fuse into a singular illuminated form—a manuscript of the governed self within a harmonized universe.