What I found most interesting about the Tres Riches Heures was the collaborative aspect. The idea of three men working as a single entity on a project was, to me, the most foreign and antiquated aspects of this particular Book of Hours. Since both writing and illustrating have overwhelmingly come to be seen as solitary activities, it’s difficult to imagine the Limbourg brothers’ process, and perhaps this is the heart of the reason that illuminated manuscripts seem almost outlandish to us today.
Orham Pamuk’s My Name is Red gets at this point as well, particularly in its method of narration. With myriad narrators from a corpse to a murderer to a tree, Pamuk paints the process of illumination–and by extent, creation–as a combined effort. Art and writing was less about individual focus than group determination, a deeply and intimately collaborative process that moved from the patron’s order to the sheep farmer to the parchment maker to the calligrapher to the illuminator (or illuminators) to the book binder and back to the patron. This is not to say that the modern book is of more or less value, but certainly it passes through far fewer hands before it’s sold.
