PUCELLE, Jean
(active c. 1319-1334 in Paris)

Belleville Breviary

1323-26
Manuscript (Ms. lat. 10484, 2 volumes), 240 x 170 mm
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

The liturgical year, the order of saints' days, offices, and feasts prescribed by the church present an ever-moving cursus. The most complex and sophisticated reworking of the liturgical cycle in the Gothic period occurs in the calendar of the Belleville Breviary, painted by the renowned Parisian illuminator Jean Pucelle.

This complex program, worked out and written down by a Dominican theologian, is one of the few surviving instances of of an iconographic scheme being recorded in a text as well as in the work itself. One of only two extant pages from the Calendar of the Breviary shows the month of December with its "red-letter days" listed below, but in addition to the figure cutting wood from the bare wintry trees at the top there are typological elements that, according to the written program, are designed to prove "the concordance of the Old Testament with the New." To this end, at the bottom of each of the twelve month a prophet hands an apostle a prophecy. Each prophet also removes a stone from the Synagogue, so that by December all that remains of it is a pile of rubble. The architectural symbolism, reminding us of the spatial metaphors of the cathedrals, continues above where the Virgin "by whom the door was opened to us" stands on top of a gate. She holds a pennant painted with an image representing an article of faith: a shrouded corpse rising from its grave.

This rather arcane program was so successful that it was copied into the calendars of books belonging to the French royal family for generations, especially in Book of Hours, which, with their calendars, provided lay people with their own cycle of daily readings and prayers to be recited at various times during the day.