Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar

Another year. A season passed.

We’ve made it through winter: food from the larder and hoary-headed frosts. The meals were heavy. So were the ermine capes, the wools and silks on our heads.

Dry January came and went.

Resolutions frayed as the weeks ticked by.

What does it mean to live a life in time?

A life divided into equal parts, shaped by the stars, named for gods and saints?

To speak astronomically, a year has a simple definition: one trip around the sun.

From one vernal equinox to the next takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Give or take.

But for a long time before Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, artists and augurers were mapping the phases of the moon and the changing of the seasons to mark the years.

We’ve been making calendars since the Bronze Age. They recur across civilizations, and across systems of knowledge.

Astronomy. Astrology. Agronomy. Hagiology. The calendar’s never been just a time-planner. It’s a cultural apparatus: a device that brings science and society into harmony.

I want to show you the most beautiful calendar ever produced. It dates to the 1410s, and it was made by hand for one of the most powerful men in France.

It was learned; it was detailed; it was impossibly lavish. And almost no one saw it but him.

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, as it’s known, is a book of hours, a devotional volume. It contains passages from the Gospels, venerations of the saints, psalms, Masses.

Between its covers are 206 sheets of fine calfskin, profusely illustrated by three Flemish artists, the Limbourg brothers: Herman, Johan and Paul.

It’s the finest surviving manuscript of the 15th century, a monument of International Gothic book arts. Really, the thing is just stupefying. Its pictures combine astounding detail with exuberant, sometimes irrational spatial organization.

It’s not only a breviary, though. Like every book of hours, it opens with a calendar. And here, on its first 12 spreads — with one full-page illustration per month — the Limbourgs did their most painstaking work.

The Très Riches Heures is now preserved in a château in Chantilly, France. And I have long been in love with its paradoxes. Its piety and its luxury. Its mathematical exactitude and its spiritual excess.

Its gaze up towards the heavens …

… and down on the earth.

More than anything, I find myself engrossed in the discrepancies it lays bare in the workings of clocks and calendars. It shows two ways of understanding our lives in time: both still with us today, anxiously rubbing against each other.

On the page devoted to January we meet the book’s owner: Jean, Duc de Berry. At different times in the early 15th century, he was the second most powerful person in France — first after his brother, King Charles V, then after his nephew, the “Mad” Charles VI.

Jean is hosting a holiday feast, at a simple trestle table laid with a white tablecloth. But the opulence is hard to miss: a massive gold salt cellar, a lavish tapestry.

There’s enough roast rabbit that even Jean’s hounds can have some.

A few scholars have proposed that this is a specific feast: an Epiphany banquet that the duke gave on Jan. 6, 1414. But it is just as likely to be a New Year celebration, at which nobles gave étrennes: token gifts of jewels, books and animals.

January is the only month in which we see the duke, lording over his book. His pose in profile, against that round fire screen, has the majesty of a commemorative medallion.

For the other 11 months, the Limbourg brothers painted scenes of hunting, harvesting and other merriment, in imagined views from the duke’s country and city houses.

The February painting takes us out into the snow.

Peasants warm up by the fire, none too modestly.

By March, the snow has melted.

The first plowing has begun in the fields outside the Château de Lusignan, one of Jean’s many mansions.

Above this pastoral view of western France are the constellations of an early spring sky. Helios drives his solar chariot. Pisces and Aries float through the star-spangled semicircle.

The stars wheel around and around, in the same place each year. But look in the innermost ring: the days marching forward, in crimson and gold.

The stars and the numbers. Old gods and new measurements. Here we come to a curious double sense of time: as something progressing even as it’s renewed.

What is a year? How do you decide when it begins? And why does it matter? Jan. 1 is hardly a red-letter day, in astronomy or religion.

In the Hebrew calendar, the year starts in September or early October. Tamil New Year is in April. Nowruz, the Iranian new year holiday, is celebrated in March.

And actually, for many centuries in Christian Europe, the new year didn’t start on Jan. 1. It began on March 25.

That’s the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating some very big news delivered via archangel. In Florence and Pisa, each March 25, locals still celebrate a citywide New Year.

The Islamic calendar follows lunar cycles, and so the timing of holidays and festivals relative to the Gregorian calendar can fluctuate quite a bit.

In 2023, New Year falls in July, but 10 years ago it happened in November.

Yet the real challenge in calendar-making, as ancient civilizations knew, is not marking new years. It’s dividing the year into months.

A year is solar, and easily evidenced by the changing of the seasons.

A month, by contrast, is lunar. And getting the moon’s cycles — 12.37 each year — to line up with the sun’s place in the sky has caused some serious scheduling problems.

In Mesoamerica, in Asia and around the Mediterranean, the astronomical discrepancy of years and months got reconciled with various additions.

Bali, for example, has a lunar calendar with 12 months per year — except when it has 13, to smooth things out.

The Balinese also have a second, mind-bending calendar with just 210 days, and weeks of varying lengths that run concurrently. (These days, there are apps.)

Both the Maya and the Egyptians added a little five-day bonus to the end of their years, to round out the preceding lunar cycles of 360 days.

Still, the sun and the moon would always be a few dashes out of line. And since the calendar was, in many societies, a priestly document, good luck getting merchants or soldiers to agree on a date.

The Romans took a different tack. Their Julian calendar — named for Julius Caesar and adopted in 45 B.C. — was exclusively solar.

It replaced the variable years with a standard one of 365 days, or 366 every fourth year.

Months ranged from 28 to 31 days, cut free of the moon’s cycles. The year began on the day the new consuls took office: the first day of the month of Ianuarius.

The Julian calendar would remain the European standard until 1582 — when the church introduced the more accurate Gregorian calendar, which recalculated leap years and skipped forward by 10 days. In that year, the period from Oct. 4 to Oct. 15 was simply canceled.

That’s the calendar used worldwide today. But we still use lunar calendars to date certain moveable feasts. Like Easter: the Sunday after the first full moon following the first day of spring.

(April 9 this year, March 31 next year. Mark your Filofaxes.)

By the time Jean commissioned the Très Riches Heures, these calculations had become pretty precise.

His fancy calendar — a Julian calendar — was more like an almanac, spelling out solar movements and feast days well into the future.

A system of Roman numerals allowed him to calculate moon phases, and thereby holidays like Easter and Pentecost. The letters indicated days of the week.

In the right column, the duke could find how many hours and minutes of daylight he would enjoy, assuming he was in Paris.

And the center column indicated the saint to which each day was holy. Saint Nicholas, Saint Boniface, so many saints: The biggest festivities were written in gold. Every day is a holiday, and every day is the Lord’s.

The duke’s calendar was valid no matter the year: even leap years, when Feb. 24 ran for 48 hours.

Looking only at the Limbourgs’ glittering miniatures, you might think that what really counted in medieval timekeeping were predictable, periodic festivals and prayers.

On the left-hand pages, time appears to be a cycle. It repeats year after year. May, with its romantic pageantry in the countryside, and the Palais de la Cité in the background …

… leads into June, with a view of the same palace, and peasants scything the duke’s grain.

Months rather than years were the meat of these cycles. Seasons. Harvests. Feasts. Constellations.

And yet all those saints’ days, leading up to Christmas, suggest how the book of hours captured a second understanding of time — one that took centuries to be reconciled with the phases of the moon.

That left-hand view came from an ancient place. In so many parts of the world, people spoke about time and measured its passage with a view to its repetition.

This kind of time could be perceived with the senses. In snowfall, in star signs. In the bright colors you wore in May, in the furs you wore in December.

This cyclical time was a conception the medieval French inherited from Greek and Roman forebears. Maya, Hindu and Buddhist temporalities are broadly similar.

The ages of humanity, in this temporal scheme, were periodic and renewable. Life frequently ends with reincarnation. Poets and priests theorized a world created and destroyed in perpetual revolutions.

And if the future is not an exact repeat of the past, it nevertheless rhymes.

History, in this formulation of time, is an eternal recurrence, repeating like the harvests and the tides. Time is a wheel.

But the monotheistic religions of the Middle East — first Judaism, then Christianity and Islam — conceived of time in a different way.

Instead of cycling around, here time progressed onward. And instead of continuous creation and destruction, it offered a one-way ticket to the end of days.

This “universal chronology,” as the historian François Hartog calls it, was strange at first. The arrow of time stretched beyond immediate human experience — from the Garden of Eden to the Incarnation and all the way to Judgment Day.

Monks started trying to calculate the exact date of the Nativity and the Crucifixion. The years themselves were renumbered to reflect this new linear chronology. We still count up and up from 1 A.D.: an educated guess for the Year of the Lord.

Think about this tension for a second. The world is renewed each morning. After winter follows spring, every year. And yet there was a beginning. There will be an end. And we are moving, irreversibly, from one pole to the other.

We perceive time only through change. But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history …

… or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?

A tool was necessary to reconcile these two schemes; and the tool was the calendar.

Here, in the Limbourgs’ months, we see the emergence of a chronology we now take for granted. Time’s cycles fall into harmony with time’s progress.

The world outside your window aligns with the world to come.

And maybe now you can see why I’m so bewitched by the Très Riches Heures. These paintings and notations make manifest how the calendar went from an instrument that simply equated years and months to a thing that bridges whole different regimes of time.

Those two regimes coexisted for a few centuries. As Europe marched toward modernity, it retained the clocks and calendars that regulated the medieval experience of time.

But time’s arrow came to point in a different, earthlier direction than the Second Coming. A new creed, of science and progress, took on the mantle of linear time.

There were efforts to give form to this new progressive time. In 1793, shortly after beheading a king, the French revolutionaries proclaimed a new Year One, with a new republican calendar.

It had new months of equal length, and a 10-day week purged of any Christian symbolism.

There was even a new clock, with 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. The hours’ revolutions would be … revolutionized.

And though the republican calendar and decimal clocks did not catch on, modern Europe would soon export its model of time — Roman and Christian in origin, imperialist and capitalist in practice — to every segment of the globe.

The hours radiated from Greenwich. Factories, and colonies, fell under Europe’s chronology.

The whole planet would be sliced into time zones.

And with each stumble toward the 21st century, each new technology, each new discovery, we have lost contact with all experiences of time but one. Jean’s book of hours gave way to another kind of perpetual calendar: stable, standardized, the same the world over.

Some of us try to rediscover a time beyond clock time: to hasten, through magic crystals or explosive devices, the dawning of a new age. But the calendar always hits back.

A changing climate has dislodged the seasons, but not the calendar itself.

Even the coronavirus pandemic, the greatest rupture to our daily routines since World War II, could not break its supremacy.

Our ancestors believed that time’s arrow pointed to apocalypse, to revolution, to some different time. While we, even when our lives turn upside down, keep time locked up in 365 little boxes.

A ticking, a trudging. Days can feel like mere dates.

When else can we live, as we record the milliseconds with atomic-clock precision? In the everlasting short term of day trading and software updates? Now that the natural world no longer keeps time as before …

… is this it? Nothing but calendar alerts to the year 3000?

Maybe not. Whatever the weather, there will be another year. Another winter, another spring.

And we are not yoked solely to the discipline of clock time. All around, right outside, are portals to an entirely different chronology we mustn’t lose sight of.

It can feel that every day is just an astronomical calendar invite. It’s so much more. And in art, we see what happens when forward motion and cyclical motion come into registration.

We see a rendezvous of what’s to come and what will always be. We perceive a life in time that’s also a life of possibilities.

Time is something we make. It’s up to us to draw the calendar. And in art, at least, we get a glimpse the full and enduring mystery of time: the cascade of cycles and progressions that, day by 24-hour day, adds up to history.

“Where can we live but days?” Philip Larkin once asked. “Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields.”

Look again at January. There’s a funny thing in this most exquisite of all calendars: The Limbourgs never finished it.

Turn back to the first spread, and the duke and his entourage are still partying, like they do every January.

But above their heads, between Capricorn and Aquarius, is an empty grille. It is waiting for you to fill in the days.

Find more in our Close Read series here. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio, Gabriel Gianordoli, Jolie Ruben and Joshua Barone.