The Carpet Depicted in the Très riches Heures of the Duc de Berry

In the fourteenth century, the book of hours provided pious Christian readers with the seven daily prayer times. They were indexed to the liturgical year, and began with a calendar, followed by excerpts from the Gospels, then by the Hours of the Virgin, the Hours of the Cross, the Hours of the Holy Spirit, the psalms of penitence, and the Litanies (prayers followed by a response). In addition, there were the Vigils of the Dead and invocations to the Saints.

The most luxurious of the books contained full-page miniatures that depicted the months of the year and the major scenes from the Gospel. The Très riches Heures of the duke Jean de Berry are the masterpiece of this genre. Commissioned by this powerful lord, who was Charles V’s brother and the uncle of Charles VI, they were illuminated between 1412 and 1416 by Paul, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg. The duke died in 1416, and Jean Colombe completed the cycle of miniatures seventy years after the death of the three artists.

The miniature of the Adoration of the Magi, on folio 52, is attributed to Paul de Limbourg[1]. It depicts the Hours of the Virgin and is one of the eight major paintings on separate leaves. The artist based his work on the legend of Jean de Hildesheim, written in the fourteenth century, which interpreted the three Magi—an old man, a middle-aged man, and a young man—as the three ages of life. Oriental references are omnipresent: the camel, leopards, turbans, and clothing adorned with pseudo-Kufic writing. The women are wearing the yashmak—a short veil that covers the lower half of the face.

However, it is the green carpet decorated with a four-leaf design under the Virgin’s feet that is the most curious oriental contribution. It is a knotted carpet, as indicated by the large fringes and the carpet’s thickness on the edge of the pile. It was originally part of a very large carpet whose framing border was removed, then cut and fixed in place along its length with a red braid. A piece that has been turned into a cushion serves a seat for the Virgin. This carpet therefore really existed. It may have belonged to the duc de Berry. The Duke’s furniture inventory does mention, amongst others, thirteen Spanish carpets and four green carpets with leaf-work embroidered in ‘the Turkish style’[2]. On initial viewing, neither the carpet’s colours nor its decorations (the four-leaf design has a Gothic appearance) match Turkish carpets seen in miniatures at the end of the Middle Ages; for example, those represented by Barthélemy d’Eyck circa 1640, in the Livre du Coeur d’Amour épris of René d’Anjou, which are both adorned with octagonal coffers and ‘Memling’ güls.

However, the red edge strip adorned with an S frieze is typical of oriental carpets. The four-leaf pattern on the carpet’s surface are a pre-fifteenth century Muslim influence. Inserted into a lozenged network, similar four-leaf designs that imitate a Hispanic-Moresque cloth adorn the clothing of the resurrected Christ on an altarpiece painted in the fourteenth century by the Catalan Pedro Serra (Manresa, colegiata basílica of Santa Maria)[3]. These repeated decorations of geometric plant designs are part of the ‘Oriental Gothic’ style that was omnipresent on Mediterranean textiles and which is also reflected on the carpet in question. However, its red border is not Spanish but rather Turkish in style. Yet, the four-leaf motif can also be observed on an ancient Anatolian carpet held in the Vakiflar Museum in Istanbul[4]. Their shape, which is a slightly truncated, contains another. It has been observed that each half of the design, from the horizontal axis, corresponded to the silhouette of the goddess-mothers of Asia Minor, a motif that was very common in the Konya Kilims and called elibelinde in Turkish. If this is the case, it is fascinating to see this image from the Neolithic cultures under the feet of the ‘new Eve’. All these factors point to the existence of a real Turkish-Anatolian carpet that belonged to the duc de Berry. The carpet of the Très Riches Heures is the earliest known representation of an oriental carpet in the history of French painting.

[2] French Documents relating to Oriental Carpets, 15th–16th Century, in Oriental Carpets and Textiles Studies II, Monique King, London 1986, pp 131–137. See also Jules Guiffrey, Inventaire de Jean duc de Berry, 1894, T. II, pp 219ff, 242, 262ff, 279ff, 293.

[3] Silk Textiles of Spain, Florence Lewis May, New York, 1957, p. 146 and p. 148, fig. 98.

[4] Carpet of the Vakiflar Museum Istanbul, Belkis Balpinar, Udo Hirsch, Wesel, 1988, plate 66, p. 309 and commentaries on pp. 134–136.