Turin–Milan Hours

The early leaves are highly decorative and ornate and completed within International Gothic traditions, with stylized backgrounds but comparatively flat depth of field.

The pages thought to have been compiled from the mid-1410s show particular skill in portraying perspective, especially those attributed to Hand G.[2] The work was commissioned in about 1380 or 1390, perhaps by the person who later owned it, Jean, Duc de Berry, brother of Charles V of France, and the leading commissioner of illuminated manuscripts of the day.

The original commissioner was certainly a great person of the French court – Louis II, Duke of Bourbon, uncle of the King and Berry, has also been suggested.

[5] D'Estampes retained most of the actual book of hours, whose illustrations were largely complete, which became known as the Très Belles Heures de Notre-Dame.

[8] Robinet d'Estampes appears to have sold the other sections, with completed text but few illustrations other than the borders, and by 1420 these were owned by John, Count of Holland, or a member of his family, who commissioned a new generation of Netherlandish artists to resume work.

[14] A single leaf with miniatures from the last phase of decoration was bought by the Getty Museum in 2000, reputedly for a million US dollars, having been in a Belgian private collection.

The borders, with one exception, all follow the same relatively simple design of stylised foliage, typical of the period when the work was started, and are largely or completely from the first phase of decoration in the 14th century.

The French art historian Paul Durrieu fortunately published his monograph, with photographs, on the Turin Hours in 1902, two years before it was burnt.

The pages attributed to him are universally agreed to be the most innovative; Hulin de Loos described these miniatures as "the most marvelous that had ever decorated a book, and, for their time the most stupefying known to the history of art.

[20] Since then art historical opinion has shifted to see both Hand G and most of the Ghent Altarpiece as the work of Jan;[21] Max J. Friedländer,[22] Anne van Buren and Albert Châtelet were among the proponents of this view.

Although the leaves are not as refined and do not evince the same technical ability as those of Hand G, they contain realistic and unflinching depictions of human distress and a number of iconographic and stylistic innovations that suggest they are copies of prototypes by Jan.[25] Charles Sterling notes similarities between Hand H and passages in the New York Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych miniature, a work for which completion dates as wide as 1420–1438 have been suggested, and which is known to have been finished by members of Jan's workshop.

Hand K is the latest and generally the weakest of the later group, working up to about 1450, and "probably painting outside the workshop environment"; he is often identified as, or linked with, the Master of the Llangattock Hours.

[30] Early attempts, for example Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane in which three imposing figures in the foreground are presented before a distant hillscape, see him, perhaps crudely, eliminating the mid-ground to create the illusion of distance.

Yet the underdrawing show him already experimenting with more effective and innovative techniques he was later to master, such as lowering the line of the horizon, and using radiating verticals to increase the sense of depth.

[34] The unique and enigmatic seashore subject seems to illustrate an episode from the ferocious internal politics of the family, who can be clearly identified by the arms on a banner.

Châtelet suggests the Peace of Woodrichem in 1419, when John succeeded in wresting control of her inheritance from his unlucky niece Jacqueline, Countess of Hainaut.

The gliding of shadows, the rippling of waves, the reflection in the water, cloud formations: all that is most evanescent and most delicate is expressed with easy mastery.

Of the seashore scene he says: "The figures in the foreground are in the chivalric style of the de Limbourgs; but the sea shore beyond them is completely outside the fifteenth-century range of responsiveness, and we see nothing like it again until Jacob van Ruisdael's beach-scenes of the mid-seventeenth century.