Originally commissioned in 1380 by the renowned bibliophile Jean, Duke of Berry (1340-1416), the three-part manuscript served as a showcase for the most important artists active in Northern Europe from the late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth centuries. The first part of the manuscript, a Book of Hours, was completed by 1413 and is preserved today in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In 1405 the Duke of Berry commissioned a second phase of the project, a prayer book and missal (texts of the Mass for the entire year), which eventually passed to John of Bavaria, Count of Holland, who commissioned Jan van Eyck to complete the work. Now preserved in the Museo Civico, Turin and known as the Turin-Milan hours, this portion of the manuscript contains the only known miniatures by van Eyck.

Jeffrey Hamburger, Irvin E. Houck Associate Professor of Art History and a specialist in medieval illuminated manuscripts, comments that: "No manuscript of the period surpasses the Très Belles Heures in importance-and none plays a more significant role in my courses on late medieval painting and Northern Renaissance art. This reproduction provides a state-of-the-art simulacrum that will allow students to experience the extraordinary complexity of an elaborately illustrated manuscript book in a way that is simply impossible with slides and diagrams alone."

"Agony in the Garden"
from the Très Belles Heures