Hours of Francis I (Metropolitan Museum / Louvre versions)
Heures de François Ier
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
Two surviving books of hours are directly associated with King François I of France (r. 1515–1547). The Metropolitan Museum version (acc. 2011.353) is the only extant fully illuminated book of hours made for the king, containing 18 miniatures depicting Gospel scenes and saints within a standard Hours of the Virgin framework. The Louvre version (1532) is an exquisite gold-bound pocket prayer book of 8.5 × 6.5 cm with 16 illuminations, described as 'a unique vestige of the treasures of the House of Valois'; its miniature scale illustrates the Valois practice of intimate, portable personal devotion. Together they document the persistence of the book-of-hours tradition at the French court even as Renaissance humanism and early evangelical currents were reshaping religious practice. Both manuscripts remained strictly within royal or immediate court circles and never circulated commercially.
Why it still matters
The Louvre version's pocket size models the Valois ideal of carrying one's prayers everywhere; its Hours of the Virgin and collects remain practical for brief, recollected personal prayer throughout the day.
Kept alongside
Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany
Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne
Commissioned 1503–1508 by Anne of Brittany — queen consort to two successive Valois kings, Charles VIII and Louis XII — and painted by Jean Bourdichon in Tours, this manuscript (BnF Ms. lat. 9474) contains 49 full-page miniatures, Latin prayers including the Obsecro te, and the offices for the canonical hours. Its 337 botanically precise plant borders give it a dual character as a prayer book and a natural encyclopedia, with each border plant identified in Latin and French. The royal family retained it until the Revolution, and it represents the high-water mark of personal Valois-court devotion executed in the Renaissance style; it is the most reproduced French book of hours after the Très Riches Heures.
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
Commissioned c. 1412 by Jean de France, Duc de Berry — son of King John II and brother of Charles V — this is the supreme surviving example of Valois private devotion in manuscript form. It contains the canonical hours structured around the Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross, Hours of the Holy Ghost, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, and additional offices and masses, all framed by the famous calendar illuminations depicting the labours of the months. The duke used it for daily private prayer in his châteaux, and it was left unfinished at his death in 1416, completed only in 1485–1489 by Jean Colombe for Charles I of Savoy. Its unmatched luxury simultaneously signals sincere personal piety and the Valois use of devotional objects as instruments of dynastic prestige.
Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry
Belles Heures du Duc de Berry
The only book of hours entirely completed by the Limbourg Brothers, made for Jean de Berry — uncle of King Charles VI and the pivotal Valois prince-patron — between 1405 and 1408/9, now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloisters Collection). It contains the Hours of the Cross, Hours of the Holy Spirit, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead, and seven unprecedented pictorial saint-cycles (Catherine, Jerome, Anthony Abbot, the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and the Passion), plus the Fifteen Joys of the Virgin. Its 172 illuminations served the duke as a personal devotional companion in chapel and chamber; at his death it passed to Yolande of Aragon, mother of Charles VII. It is the most devotionally coherent and structurally complete of the Berry books of hours.