Photo. Giraudon.
JUNE.
Pol de Limbourg.
From The “Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.”
To face page 162.
Comte Paul Durrieu identifies the Très Riches Heures with a MS. mentioned also in an Inventory of 1523 as “une grande heure escripte à la main,” whereby it can be explained how the Grimani Breviary,[34] executed about the end of the sixteenth century, and other Flemish MSS. have obviously taken this famous Codex as a model; and even in some points copied it very closely.
When Margaret of Austria died in 1530 the volume passed into the hands of one of her executors, Jean Buffant, Treasurer to the Emperor Charles V; and from that time there occurs a gap which even Paul Durrieu has so far been unable to fill. The present binding of red morocco leather belongs to the eighteenth century and bears the coat-of-arms of the Spinola family, which points strongly to the probability that the volume also once belonged to the celebrated General Spinola, who captured the town of Breda—an historical event immortalised by Velasquez. From the Spinolas it came into the family of the Sèvres, a fact proved by another coat-of-arms amongst the illuminations; and from a member of that family it was acquired by the Duc d’Aumale, by whom it was deposited at Chantilly.
From this amazing list of MSS. we may see that nearly all the important books and manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are represented at Chantilly. Some portions of the collection go back to the old Montmorency and Condé acquisitions; whilst the Duc d’Aumale himself has described the origin and vicissitudes of the articles gathered in by himself in his admirable work The Philobiblon Miscellanies, which will always remain the best guide to the Cabinet des Livres at Chantilly.