The Very Rich Hours of the duke of Berry, Part 5: June Page

Part 5: June Page

The June page was completed in the 1480s by an artist who is believed to be Barthélemy d’Eyck (Château de Chantilly https://les-tres-riches-heures.chateaudechantilly.fr/). It depicts the activity of haymaking, which occupied the early summer of a peasant’s agricultural calendar. Haymaking was essential to ensure that livestock would be well fed during the winter. In the middle ground, three men use scythes to cut overlong grass. They wear long tunics and undergarments without shoes. This is not only reflective of the heat of the summer, but also the strenuous nature of their labor. In the foreground, two women use rakes to scrape the grass into neat piles to dry in the sun. The women wear shifts (long undershirts) and dresses. Significantly, their clothes rise above their ankles; if you noticed the noblewomen from April and May, their clothes tumbled to the ground. This is, again, reflective of social hierarchy: peasant women also performed manual labor and needed freedom of movement. Furthermore, garments like those worn by noblewomen were also more expensive both because of the amount of material required and the expert tailoring needed to create them. Like the men in the middle ground, the peasant women of this June page also do not wear shoes. Shoes were expensive and could get ruined quickly during such laborious tasks. 

In the background, once again, is Île de la Cité with its palace and Sainte Chapelle (the private chapel of France’s monarchy). Whereas the May page showed the heart of Paris from the perspective of the aristocracy, the June page reflects the enormous hierarchical divide between the peasantry who worked the land and the monarchy who ruled it. The peasants work outside of Paris’s walls. If we harken back to the essay discussing the basics of illuminated manuscripts, the area close to city walls was wear smelly and unsightly trades like tanning were situated. Furthermore, farming itself was a dirty and smelly activity: fertilizer for the regions surrounding Paris was provided by the waste accumulated from inside the city walls. This June page ironically idealizes agricultural activities, zhuzhing it up for the duke of Berry and anyone else who was lucky enough to lay eyes on it. This speaks to the voyeurism that is incorporated into this calendar page: we are viewing the peasantry from a top-down lens. This is reflected in the quasi-nudity of the figures; although reflective of reality, we still get to see more skin. Additionally, the women themselves are painted according to ideals of feminine beauty: they are pale, they are dainty, they are curvy. Real peasant women at this time would have been muscular and tan. The calendar pages continue with the agricultural theme in the following July page.