` For Our Devotion and Pleasure ' : The sexual

In the Middle Ages superbly crafted and precious artworks were used to glorify God as well as to attract more money through gifts and donations to institutions like monasteries and cathedrals. Wealthy individuals like kings, lords and bishops also amassed art objects in order to display their power. But it is only with Jean, Duc de Berry (1340±1416) that we can see the frenzy of accumulation, an impulse to own art, not in order to glorify or even to save an ego but rather to create one. The inventory made during the duke's lifetime by his `garde des joyaux' Robinet d'E tampes gives us some sense of the variety and scope of his collection. Most prized by the duke were the thousands of `joyaux' or jewels, most of them now lost. Closely related to his precious stones were the scintillating surfaces of his illuminated books, culminating in the famous TreÁ s Riches Heures. He also acquired sacred relics, such as a spine from Christ's Crown of Thorns, which he had encased in an elaborate gold and enamel reliquary, now in the British Museum. In addition Jean owned twelve magnificent chaà teaux which he filled with tapestries, sculptures and paintings. The most splendid, at Mehun-sur-YeÁ vre, housed a menagerie of exotic creatures, including a monkey, a camel and an ostrich, each of which had its own personal paid gardien.1 The acquisition of all these objects and bodies, living and dead, was made possible because of vast wealth produced from tracts of land. As well as owning the fertile lands of the Berry, Jean was Duc d'Auvergne, Comte de Poitou and governor of Languedoc, gaining large parts of southern France through his two political marriages. These lands were valuable because they brought with them thousands of serfs. In this sense the duke's peasant subjects were also his objects, as they are represented toiling in the fields of his estates in one of his most precious possessions ± the calendar of the TreÁ s Riches Heures (plate 1).2 These bodies provided the taxes and produced the crops that paid for every page of this manuscript in which they were pictured. The body and the art object were intimately connected not only on the level of production and power, but also in relation to another fundamental but often overlooked function ± to give the duke pleasure. Werner Muensterberger tries to explain Jean de Berry's desire to amass so many beautiful things in his study of the psychology of collecting. At the height of the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe in 1349, he argues, nine-year-old Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 24 No. 2 April 2001 pp. 169±194